Co-education

I was musing on the possibilities of royal baby names this morning when I remembered something that happened when I was a Freshman in high school umpty years ago. We had big tall lockers that normally two students shared. Like everyone else I was assigned a locker partner. Mine happened to be a girl. I thought it was a little odd, probably she did too. But we stayed out of each other's way and went on with our lives. I think it must have been after Christmas holidays when it came to the attention of the stuffy administration (all high school administrations were stuffy in those days) that some boys were sharing lockers with girls... On purpose, shudder... That, of course, could lead to flirting and what-not. So that needed to be stopped. There was a dire announcement over the school intercom about it, one day. A friend of mine knew about my situation, and since his locker partner had departed school, he suggested I move in with him. Sounded good to me. So I went into the school office at lunch to explain to the secretaries that I'd been assigned with a girl to the same locker. "What's your locker partner's name," they asked. Therein lay the problem. Her slightly uncommon given name could have been for either a girl or a boy. But, it so happened that her first and last name together were exactly the same as a man very famous in those days. Being the times, no one exclaimed, "Oh, shit!" But they did hurry to straighten things out. "I'll move in with my firend," I suggested. "Oh, no!" they said, surprising me with their sternness. "We'll move her!" they said in a tone that said it was the only solution to satisfy common decency. So for the rest of the year, instead of her having the locker to herself, I had it to myself.