Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Picking my WDC Name and Handle

Picking my Name and Handle

When I arrived at WDC, like everyone else, I was faced with coming up with two names. One was my WDC name and the other was my pen name. My WDC name is trebor and my pen name is Percy Goodfellow.

Now the trebor name was chosen because it was something I could remember easily. It is my first name spelled backwards. The pen name was a little more complex and came to me sort of out of the blue.

The Percy part came from a romance novel character called Lord Percy. He was a character in Baroness Orczy’s novel the Scarlet Pimpernel. He was an English Lord who operated in secrecy rescuing members of the French nobility from the guillotine. He recruited a band of faithful followers and had many exciting adventures. The French went to great lengths to discover his secret identity and he masqueraded as a Fop… an effete, sort of guy, so nobody would ever guess that he was the bold and audacious Scarlet Pimpernel. His signature was the flower he took the the name from.

There was a poem he would recite at parties he threw at his lavish estate. I don’t remember the whole thing but one of the stanzas went like this.

They seek him here, they seek him there...
The Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he from heaven or from hell?
That damned elusive pimpernel.

These Ortzy novels were wonderful reading and ranked right up there with Alexander Dumas and another of my favorites, The Three Musketeers. In more recent times Raphael Sabatini and his classic, Scaramouche, and Captain Blood were of the same genre. Swashbuckling Romance Novels have always been a hit with me. As a youngster they helped me escape into a world that was quite a contrast to the real world I lived in. So I chose “Percy” to be my pen name.

Where I got the Goodfellow part from I’m not sure. It sort of went with Percy and together the two names had a resonance. So, that is how I got the WDC name trebor and the pen name Percy Goodfellow.