What's In A Name? - The Tale Of Fred Mycock, The Casanova Of Washington

The surname Mycock was first found in Lancashire where Maicoc le Crouder was listed in the Assize Rolls of 1284. Later, William Maycock, Moycock was listed in the Assize Rolls for Staffordshire in 1323 and Thomas Macok and John Moycok were both found in the Subsidy Rolls for Derbyshire in 1327. 1

This surname is derived from the name of an ancestor. 'the son of Matthew'. The variant Mocock, afterwards Mycock, seems to have been popular in East Lancashire and over the border into West Riding of Yorkshire It still remains in Manchester and district.

 

The Mycock family of which Fred was the latest in a long line, came to America shortly after Plymouth Rock and were instrumental in establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which, along with Jamestown, was one of the first organized colonial settlements in the New World. 

Isaiah Mycock had been a farmer in England like his forbears, but saw opportunity and profit across the Atlantic and with his sharp intelligence, ambition, and courage was an early founding father of the new nation. 

There was nothing pretentious about the man - he was not from aristocratic stock, and although his lineage dated back over three centuries, he was unrecognized in any royal genealogical records.  His family had been small landowners, merchants, and sailors over the years, well known for thrift, hard work, and moral rectitude, and were not surprised at Isaiah's desire to leave his native land and search his fortune across the seas. 

Isaiah had a natural organizational ability - nothing in his background foresaw his vision of the Colony and its managerial role in New England.  The Colony was both government, land owner, developer, and court.  It resembled the British East India Company which was founded not long before Massachusetts and was the forerunner of the British Raj. 

 

The Mycocks were a uniformly entrepreneurial family and did well over the years, becoming wealthy from shipbuilding, shipping, trade, and finance.  One of the Mycocks founded Parsons, Baker & Locke, one of the first Wall Street investment banks which was the financial engine behind the Three Cornered Trade, the further development of the New Haven plantations, and the funding of Lewis and Clark. 

America being the melting pot of history - a potpourri of immigrant families from England, Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe - the particularly historic legacy of the Mycock family was lost in the jumble and Fred became simply Freddie Mycock.  The original pronunciation of the name was 'my cock' and despite the American slang imputation, the family refused to change the way it was pronounced.  After much teasing, Freddie began saying his name as Mih-Cock but when word got around to his father, the boy was given a drumming and told never again to dishonor his forbears. 

So My Cock it was, and Freddie had to endure years of, 'How's my cock today?' or 'Has my cock been up to anything?'

As it happened Fred loved women, more than most men in fact; and from early adolescence they turned his head.  In eighth grade he could not take his eyes off Nancy Blythe who in the warm weather wore sleeveless blouses, exposing her soft, round, full breasts. Or Melanie Trott, the optometrist's daughter who sat primly upright but beneath the desk kept her legs gently parted, moving slowly to some internal rhythm that glued Fred to the spot. 

 

In later years the teasing about his name stopped - or, because of his success with women, was transformed into 'cocksman'.  Professors at Harvard still stumbled over his name, stubbornly calling him Mr. Mih-Cock, feeling some unease at the correct pronunciation and not wanting to be accused of male pandering. After class Fred corrected them, at first going into family history but then simply reproaching them for repeated, deliberate distortion of his name. 

Form follows function, or something like that, Fred thought remembering the architect Louis Sullivan's famous philosophy.  Not exactly appropriate or relevant here.  What's in a name? was more apt. Name and destiny were somehow interrelated.  Of course Carpenters did not always become carpenters or Hoopers hoopers - those old English days were long gone - but still, there was something to this 'Destiny of Nomenclature'. 

Take Felicia Rose, for example, a young, beautiful girl that he had met in Harvard Yard, a girl whose freshness, coloring, and stunning perfection could only be found in a rose - the most magnificent, memorable, lasting flower of summer.  Or Bobby Redwood, as tall, solid, and impressive as the great trees of Northern California. 

 

Fred was by no means a mystic or given to any fanciful notions about predestination or some special divine wiring.  He just felt at one with his name, and rode with it. 

Off to Washington as it turned out.  He had been noticed by an aide to the Secretary of Defense who was two years ahead of him at Harvard but was in the same advanced mathematics class.  Both young men were fascinated by number theory and the secrets locked within; and the classmate had been recruited by the government to work on codes - breaking Russian ones and creating unbreakable American ones.  Fred Mycock would be a welcome addition to the team. 

Most people come to official Washington because of political ambition, but Fred, in the clouds with numbers, only wanted a chance to pursue his particular passion; but what he found equally if not more appealing was the flock of young, blonde, blue-eyed beauties who had come to Washington with the new administration.  Gone were the frizzy-haired sexually indeterminate, midday washing women of an earlier political era, and in glorious force were the stunning newcomers from Middle America.

It took him no time to meet them on park benches, in conference rooms, at coffee shops, and on K Street.  They were as fascinated with him as he was with them.  The very words 'my cock' associated with this handsome young mathematician were aphrodisiacal and irresistible. It was as if a spell had been cast on them, a diaphanous silken veil thrown over them which made them dream of erotic adventures with him. 

They wondered what his cock would feel like inside them, filling them, satisfying them, bringing them to climax in a final, ecstatic moment.  Of course this drabble was only because of a girly passion with True Romance and the sappy books of Violet Morris.  Ordinarily they would never put their desire into such words, a thing to be kept hidden, to be discovered by the right man. 

Of course any objective observer would have dismissed the whole my-cock issue.  Fred was simply an attractive, well-educated, handsome young man from a good family; so what young woman would not be interested? but Fred knew differently.  There was something magical in his name, and yes, in his cock that was unique, a one in a million. The more women fell for him, the more he was convinced of his special endowment, his piece of history, his remarkable talents. 

It had to end, this unusual odyssey.  Maturity in a man has a lot of staying power, but youth is the powerful transfixer, and so it was that Fred's allure faded over time.  The name had lost its mystical power, and he blended into the woodwork, one of Washington's legendary bureaucrats.  

His sexual distractions had blurred his once sharp mathematical insights, and he was resigned to managing others, a demotion which he took in stride until his Lotharian appetites waned along with women's interest in him.  Then he was like a thousand others, a hundred thousand before him, one more in a line of arrivistes, heady with assumptions of power. 

'How's my cock?', said an old high school buddy of his upon his return to Chillicothe after his long sojourn in Washington.  Freddie smiled, gave the man a hug, and regretted nothing. 

What's in a name? Nothing.  Everything.