Watch out for Isidore

An American poet, famous in my youth, who like many of his generation of artists and writers spent a year or two in Paris - he also spent a year in England - he wrote a memorable poem late in life about American names. And it ends:

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Most of the names that Stephen Vincent Benet was yearning for in his old age were ominous reminders of the violent history of the Far West - Deadwood, Endurance, Last Gasp, Tombstone - but you can learn quite a bit about American history from following the changes from generation to generation in naming human beings.

I wonder how Benet would have responded to a public warning that was issued last Monday and led the evening news on all the national networks.

By a year's association it was scary, which is perhaps why it led the evening news. This is how it went:

"Be on the alert. Go about your normal business but be ready to evacuate. Watch out for Isidore!"

Now that was issued, proclaimed over loudspeakers, recited by door-to-door coastguards and other officials.

Where? Along a 400-mile stretch of the Gulf coast - the Gulf of Mexico coast that is.

Florida, you know, drops into the Atlantic Ocean like the barrel of a pistol and the long handle of the pistol curls round an enormous curve known as the Gulf coast.

It was to the people of this coastal stretch that the warning words went out: "Be on the alert - watch out for Isidore!"

Isidore is the name given to the ninth tropical storm of the season.

All such storms are brewed in the Caribbean and tend to move north into the Bahamas and then north to hit the Florida peninsula - or turn west, which at this writing seems to have done, and threaten, for the third time this season, the Gulf coast.

Early last spring the Hurricane Centre in Miami predicted that this season - through August, September to mid-October - would be a record year for tropical storms that turned into hurricanes, the difference being not between the pattern of the storm, which is that of a whirling doughnut, but the speed of the winds whirling inside the circle.

Up to 73 miles an hour it's a tropical storm. Higher than that it's rated a hurricane.

The prophets in Miami added to their spring warnings that the Northeast Atlantic coast - we - would be specially vulnerable.

Well I'm happy to say so far the wizards have been 100% wrong - we have never been threatened.

Most storms have died in the Bahamas or switched east and died out in the Atlantic Ocean.

By this time I hear some steady hissing of "Why that name?" Isidore, I admit, is an easy name to hiss.

Well for, until I should guess about 30 years ago, the Hurricane Centre of the United States Weather Bureau, without a second thought, gave female names to hurricanes.

And then along came Betty Friedan.

Goodness, I just realised that next year will be the 40th anniversary of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, which is to women's lib what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is to the environmental movement.

So at some time I should guess in the '70s or early '80s at the latest, it must be counted one of the great achievements of the women's liberators that they made such a to-do with the Weather Bureau that it cried "Hold, enough, yes ma'am, yes ma'am" - and changed the system forever.

Whereby hurricanes would be named alternately male and female.

As first Adam, then Eve, then Samson, then Delilah.

I'm sorry to say they didn't have as much fun in the renaming as my little sequence suggests.

But for several years the rhythm and the familiar names came up from midsummer on - male and female.

I said familiar - almost a Freudian slip.

Familiar to an American with English roots. Not familiar to probably three quarters of the population.

Not to Latinos or Asians - who now, by the way, represent a majority, with blacks, of the population of California.

Well this caused no misgivings to arise in the Weather Bureau until the tide of incoming South and Central American immigrants was higher than the European wave of the early 20th Century.

Women's lib had done its part. Now the weather bureau heard from the latest breed of citizens - the Latinos.

The annual list of anticipated hurricanes was adapted accordingly.

So two years ago the sequence of names announced was Alberto, Chris, Debby, Ernesto and includes Helene, Isaac, Nadine, Rafael - the Anglos getting in a final lick with William.

No minority since or before its liberation in 1954 has been more inventive with its names than the blacks.

Through two or three generations at the end of the 19th and through the middle of the 20th Century, many devout blacks gave to their newborn daughters names of Christian virtues - Charity, Patience, Hope, Faithful, Tolerance.

We once had a maid who - way back in the '30s when you had a maid - who'd been named, that's to say christened, Faithful Honour. And another, Goodness Abounding. "Call me Goody," she said.

More secular types call on more ancient gods - how about Venus and Serena?

As for jazz players - among whom, at one time, I had a pretty wide acquaintance - there was such an abundance of nicknames that it was often a surprise to learn that a man everywhere know as Peewee or Strut or Duke or Earl had not been so named at birth.

Families with high hopes for their newborn son imitated the whites with resounding double-barrelled first or given names.

Whereas whites, very often, combined a Biblical hero's name with a family name - producing the grandeur of President Warren Gamaliel Harding - blacks moved into the high altitudes for a second name to combine with the Biblical first.

My favourite among these is the name of the late be bop pianist: Thelonius Sphere - as in hemisphere - Thelonius Sphere Monk.

By the way, talking of alphabets, I suppose every nation has what is known among phoneticians as a recital alphabet - the system people dictating over the phone use to make clear to the blind listener the difference between B for baby and P for Peter.

There was a happy time in my professional life when once my daily despatch to my paper had been typed out I pressed a button and it went over a teletype to the Western Union in New York and they transmitted it to Manchester.

Then unhappily in the name of progress the transatlantic cable was laid down and the British editors said "Wonderful, now our man in Washington or New York can dictate his piece."

Which I did for about 20-25 years, dictating about 1,000 or 1200 words a day.

I marvel that I have any throat, any uvula left - I wonder I have any u, v for victory, u, l for Lawrence, a - uvula - l for Lawrence, e, f for Fanny, t for Tommy left.

I have to say that when I was dictating a short, one-sentence cable to my editor over the New York telephone there was at least one required variation of the recital alphabet. To New York phone operators n is not for Nancy, n is for Nathan.

Well look where Isidore has taken us.

But what happened to Isidore? It ousted even Iraq from the headlines for a day or two and northern papers, especially, went on, as they always do, about the threat to New Orleans.

What is recalled later is that it's better fortified than any coastal city we know by a chain of levees and dykes built a century ago.

Still, whenever a hurricane is threatened there's always the chance that one may leap the levee and flood the entire city.

Well the storm hit Louisiana at dawn on Thursday and by then the whirling winds had dropped to a mere 60 miles an hour and subsiding and New Orleans got off with a foot of rain and some streets turned into shallow canals.

Whereas in any other city the evacuees would heave a sigh and trundle back to their homes, there they rushed home, families adjoined families behind houses or restaurants, all boarded up with plywood, and prepared to celebrate an old New Orleans tradition - a hurricane party.

Loudspeakers now announced the locations of these jousts and out on the internet went a reminder of the drink of choice: the Pat O'Brien - four ounces of rum plus four ounces of a secret mix.

An old black man was quoted as protesting: "Just because t'ain't hurricanes, no cause not to have a hurricane party, man!"

"As that old cat Isiah said: 'Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die.' And that's the truth of it."