So what's in a name?

Steve Stonebreaker is a football name.
DiMag and the Mick are baseball names.
Some names don't need any further I.D.
Bono and Sonny were joined at the hip and Cher doesn't need a last name.
An article in an international newsmagazine, I think it was "Time," at least a decade and a half ago, declared a name such as Chip Glass could never be an archbishop. It just didn't fit.
So what are you trying to say, Corbett?
When I was born in Truro, Nova Scotia way back when, my mother named me Kerwood MacDonald Corbett. What a handful.
Kerwood.
"Kerwood-da from Pictou-a," was a thorn in my side as I grew up in the small seaport of Pictou during WWII.
Of course, school kids can be cruel with their remarks.
Then as the years gatherered on me, I sought other names to overcome my mother's penchant for naming me. Don. Mac. Woody. They all sounded better than Kerwood.
In high school, there was a popular show -- "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" -- and that was another tag I couldn't live with.
However, out of that anguish came the name -- Kaye, or sometimes, OK -- when I learned some favorite football players of my era were named Kaye or a derivation of it. There was O.K. Dalton, Kay Stephenson and Ottawa's great lineman, Kaye Vaughan.
How could I run out onto a football field with people yelling, "Kerwood, Kerwood, Kerwood?"
That's how Kaye Corbett came into existence.
There still was nagging question of just who this Kerwood was?
In 1985, a elderly pastor and his wife visited my farm near Edmonton, Alberta, and the conversation turned to people's names. "Oh, you're named after a famous English writer," she said.
"An English writer?" I asked.
During a lifetime, most people look for their roots.
In 1992, I started looking for Kerwood.
What I didn't know at the time, that my mother somehow misspelled Kerwood as in James Oliver Curwood and he was an American wilderness writer from a small, sleepy town of Owosso, near Flint, Michigan.
Suddenly, my interest in this writer began to grow and since I lived in Toronto at the time, I would travel to Owosso on an almost monthly basis. The quest for my namesake became almost insatiable.
While searching in a Toronto-area library, I discovered a dust-covered book, "The Grizzly King." written by Curwood in 1916. It would later become an international favorite movie, "The Bear." It was the only novel by Curwood I could uncover at the time.
While the world might have forgotten him, his hometown didn't, even though he died in 1927.
Owosso resident Ivan Conger introduced me to this fascinating man, who over his lifetime wrote 33 wilderness books and romance novels, based on his experience, most in the British Columbia wilderness, about 200 miles from my present-day Falkland, B.C. farm.
Conger, a tall giant, has kept Curwood's memory intact as a historian, and every year JOC is remembered with a three-day festival in early June in Owosso.
The novelist was one of two famous sons, who lived besides the Shiawassee River. The other was the late U.S. presidential contender Thomas E. Dewey.
As in everyone's life, there were two turning points in Curwood's life.
In "Son of the Forest," he wrote:
"In the ninth year of my life came an event of importance. I "got religion," as the experience was then called -- so hard that I became a seven-day wonder in our rural community. Revival meetings were held at Joppa (Ohio), a mile distance from our farm. At a night meeting, when the excitement of the audience had reached high pitch, I gave the most amazing exhibition that the "Holy Ghost" had entered into me. Leaping suddenly to the platform of the little country church, I loudly proclaimed my salvation. If ever a boy was inspired, I was. No ancient prophet saw his marvelous visions, now preserved to us in Holy Writ, more clearly than I saw mine, I believe."
Then he continued, "That first night of my salvation I went home cross-lots, unwilling to share the highway with anyone. I was unafraid of dark fields and ghostly woods for an angel went with me. She was tall and of great beauty. Her wings and flowing robes were white as snow and her beautiful long hair streamed in golden splendor about her. She was there to guide and protect me. Of what should I be afraid? My exaltation was complete."
However, the experience began to wane for Jim after his "Huck" pals began teasing him.
In later life, he began to worship Nature.
Judith A. Eldridge in her 1993 non-fiction account, "God's Country and the Man," was precise in describing his second life-changing experience.
"When the wounded bear he faced on a mountain ledge that day turned aside, James Oliver Curwood's relief was that his life had been spared. More than that resulted from this encounter; his life was profoundly altered. Curwood was already 35 that summer of 1914, and already a well-known author of Great Lakes fiction and non-fiction and novels of romance and adventure set in the Canadian north. Now he would become an avid conservationist in the early days of that movement, a change that would directly lead to his death 13 years later."
On Saturday, August 13, 1927, Jim Curwood died from possibly a sting or bite which caused leg and kidney complications.
In 1905, his first novel, "Falkner of the Island Seas," was published in book form and in the following 17 years some 32 other novels were published.
After leaving his Detroit newspaper career, he began his novels and spent as much as six months a year in the wilderness and built log cabins in the remoteness of British Columbia and Quebec.
Besides becoming one of the most highly paid novelists of his generation, he was also a prolific screen and magazine writer.
Following his death in his 49th year, his memory quickly faded; however, his hometown of Owosso remembers him well with an annual festival and his magnificent "writing castle" beside the Shiawassee.
Now, excuse me while I take another look at the dust-free "The Grizzly King." It's only one of my complete and coveted Curwood library of books and magazines.
Incidentally, I'm not changing my name back to Kerwood from Kaye or OK. Of course, my other hero, The Duke, John Wayne, defied his momma when she gave him his 'real' name of Marion Michael Morrison.