Why jbaltz?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away (Wallingford, PA, if you must know), Jerry was happily going through middle school, until a certain gym teacher mispronounced his name as "Jeff Saltzman", claiming he knew one once and my name was just too close to his in his (the teacher's) mind.

Well, the name stuck. All the way through high school, I had the somewhat strange nickname of "Saltz", probably because it has only one syllable, whereas "Jerry" or "Altzman" each have two.

After high school, the name continued to stick among friends who knew me. By that time (it had been 6 years by now) I had acclimated myself to the name. When I was hired as a UI (consultant) by CUCCA (now AcIS), I was asked what my login ID should be on CUCCA's DEC-20 systems. Figuring that I might as well have just kept my nickname (UI.JERRY seemed so plain) I chose UI.SALTZ.

That was not to be. At that time, user services had another consultant, Sharon Saltzman. Given that my name didn't have an S anywhere in it, I was forced by then head-UI's Ben Fried and Chuck Garrett (no WWW link yet) to pick a short login name that preferably used my initials or my name. Well, nonplussed, I decided that UI.JALTZ had similar problems to UI.SALTZ, so I resumed using my middle initial (B, short for Brent, a name for which I was much teased during elementary school) and came up with UI.JBALTZ. When CUCCA migrated to unix mainframes, the UI. part of userid's were dropped and I became simply jbaltz

Over the years this has proven to be a source of entertainment to me:

Even though my full name (Jerry B. Altzman) appears at the top of every piece of electronic mail I send, and every document I sign has my full name, I still receive mail addressed to "Jerry Baltz".
Acquaintances I met over the {ARPA,[Ii]nter}net knew me as "jaybaltz" (prounounced out loud) but never as Jerry, and when I met them in person and was introduced to puzzled looks as "Jerry", I would say "jbaltz" and said acquaintances would respond "Ahh, so you're the one who..." (Fill in your favorite act here)
Friends who knew me first in person and tried to impress me with their newbie-ism would call me by jbaltz, much to my chagrin :-)
To this day, I still have one friend who insists on calling me Baltz, and came to my wedding and addressed my wedding present "Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Baltz"
Just recently, it was suggested that were I still working in statistical physics, I could come up with a "Baltz-man" distribution (All you physics geeks out there who understand that, raise your hands.).

So now you know a little bit why it's all jbaltz

Last update: 17 VIII 2005