Page 24 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Speaking of names, you might have felt that something was awry when I mentioned that my father’s kid brother’s name was Albert Reade. Reade! Yes, Reade. Uncle Albert had relieved himself of the Yaverbaum surname for what I was told were professional reasons. That makes sense; Albert was a food chemist. More unusual is the fact that my father’s older sister, Celia, married a cousin, Sam Yaverbaum, thus becoming Celia Yaverbaum Yaverbaum long before there was a Major Major. My mother, a true egalitarian, never ceased regarding Celia, Anna, and Albert as the Yaverbaums.
At this point, it should be noted that there are three ways to pro- nounce my last name: first, with the a in Yaver pronounced as one would pronounce the a in cat; second, with that a pronounced as you would pronounce the a in cave; and finally, with that a as pronounced as you would pronounce the ar in car. When I was a child, I was clearly a cat man. When I was a professional and, in particular, due to the preference of my first wife’s family (about which, a lot more later), I was a car man. I never met a cave man, but many people would use that pronunciation when they had to address me for the first time.
As you would imagine, I have been asked thousands of times how to spell my actually phonetic, but apparently difficult, surname. Usually, I do it as my mother did: “Y, A, V as in Victor; E, R, B as in boy; A, U, M as in Mary.” I finally got in the habit of burlesquing the process by saying that it is easy to spell the name: “It’s Y as in Yaverbaum, A as in averbaum, V as in verbaum,” etc. Sometimes, when friends would parody the name (for example, in camp, “Grab-a-broom”), I would reply: “Yaverbaum—y’ave a better name?”
The most ludicrous episode relating to the spelling out of my name occurred when my camera failed on the night before Kathy and I were to start a three-day shoot in Death Valley. In desperation, we concluded that seeking critically needed help at 11:00 p.m. California time might work only if we were to place a call to Germany. Two calls led me to Herr Lothar Leuhring at about 8:30 a.m. his time. His English was far better than my German, which meant that he could put together a few sentences. However, when it came to taking my name, he pretty much
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