I recently had a conversation online with one of my neighbors, Mike.  Mike and I met years ago at the store in Berlin, but we’d lost each other since.  He found this weblog the other day and wanted to say hello.  We’re close enough that we could probably shout at each other across the holler, but we had to come to the Internet to meet up. That’s the way it is out here.  I knew immediately that he was not a local, because his first name did not begin with an ‘O.’  Around here, that is a dead giveaway.  He’s a recent transplant from the city like me.  I promised him I’d take him to Mister Browning’s Store someday soon and introduce him around.

Y’all have to understand, after 18 years of owning a farm, I’m still a bit of a stranger. I try and get out and meet people, but I still live in town during the week. I also live on the end of a long road with very few folks living on it. I get maybe one vehicle a week coming down my way, and most of the time it is someone who is lost. I’m still on the outside looking in.

One thing that had me flummoxed from the beginning is the fact that everyone seems to name their male children after a guy whose name began with ‘O’ .

I met O.P. first. He lives in the trailer just up the road. Within 5 minutes of meeting him the first time, I’d found out he’d been begging the previous owners for years for permission to hunt, but he’d been hunting the property anyway and taken some really nice deer.

O.T. ran the mower shop. He was my friend for years before passing away not too long ago– he was a consummate turkey hunter.

O.D. holds court down at Mister Browning’s store with his poodle, Babette. He’s the local authority on deer hunting

O.C. we hardly ever see him at the store. He complains about Brownings being too dusty for him.

O.G. He’s a really nice guy, but everyone picks on him.

O.J. He used to play football way back in the day, but he’s been living with a cloud over his head for the better part of 30 years– can’t stay out of jail

O.K. A go-along to get-along kind of guy. You can count on him to get at least a doe for the freezer every year.

O.O. An older gent who stopped coming by the store. He says he’s bored with O.D. taking all the oxygen, but his wife says he’s embarrassed to show up in a Depends.

. . . you get the idea

I found out that the ‘O’ usually stands for a seemingly random first name. What I mean is that it may be Owen, it may be Oscar. Oren may have a father named Ogden and a son named Oliver.

There are two main clans in these parts that hold to the ‘O’ custom. However, they have different origin stories and claim the others are posers. The first of these clans have a Big ‘O’ progenitor of the same generation as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton. That Big ‘O’ was supposedly the baddest dude of them all and whipped bears and Indians bare-handed with only one arm– folks disagree if he actually only had one arm or if he just used one to be more sporting. Mix Dan’l Boone with Paul Bunyon and subtract the blue ox and you’ve gotten close.

The other clan’s primal ‘O’ sounds like a cross between Mike Fink and Jack Sparrow– a drunken whoring cuss that ran flatboats up and down the Licking River. He lived at a later time– prior to the 1840s and spread his seed up and down the river rather extravagantly up to the confluence with the North Fork of the Licking. That’s just a couple of miles from the farm.

To confuse things, you have all sorts of other ‘O’s in the mix.  There is Abraham Owen, the namesake of Owensboro.  He was a surveyor that mapped out a lot of the territory in these parts. He later died at Tippecanoe. There are Owen Counties in both Kentucky and Indiana as well as Owenton, KY.  All these are named for him.  Folks used to say he was the Big ‘O,’ however, I have it on good authority that this is false hearsay.  Nevertheless, when people want to distance themselves from the local clans, they’ll put on airs and tell folks they’re related to this guy.

There are also a bunch of Owensvilles scattered across the area, and none of the local histories give any indication of why they are called that.  One simply states: “It was originally platted as Boston and the name changed to Owensville in 1836.”

To confuse things even further, there was a lot of Welsh moving into these parts, and with their penchant for naming their kids Owen or Owain and the fact that Welsh used to name their kids with the same names over and over, it got the waters muddied up right good.

Meanwhile the real Big ‘O’ recedes into the dark recesses of history.

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