Throughout college I was called Doc, simply because during my freshman year I took a hallmate to the bathroom and helped him flush his eyes out after he caught it in the face during an infamous spray deodorant war. "You must be some kind of Doctor ," the victim said, and the name stuck...
A kid that rodeo'ed up near where I spent my teens on our ranch in the Rocky mountains was named William Cody. He was a crazy bull rider. I called him Wild Bill. I didn't know him well. He was the little jerk that taunted me into trying crewing Bull Durham tobacco at the county fair. Real cowgirls chew he says and the two girls with him were chewing, (mild snus "snoose" I found out later), so I tried it. Then slapped me on the back causing me to swallow it. I spent hours lying in the straw, fetal position in pain, vomiting. I used to have a poem about this I recited at Cowboy Poetry gatherings.I changed his name to Billy the Kid, Hickok he was not!
At one point in my early years I did indeed have a nick name however unflattering to me that it was. In 5th grade or so, there was a boy who liked to provoke other boys into fighting. I guess I finally wound up on his list of kids to fight because he kept taunting me by messing around with my last name. After recess one day, we were all filing into the classroom and for whatever reason he started playing the name game again and one of those names was “boom-boom”. The teacher hadn’t made it to the room yet and I had had enough with the bully so I walked over from my desk to his and knocked him out of his desk and he landed sprawled onto the floor. When I circled the desk to pursue the matter a bit further, the teacher had arrived by that time and stopped me from doing any more harm. She then escorted myself and “Johnny” to the principles office for swats but it was all good because the bully cut a very wide swathe around me from then on. Later, the kids passed around a nick name for me which stuck but I really didn’t mind because it was more out of respect than making fun of my name. The nick name? Boom-Boom........
You were probably not the only one with that nickname, @Bobby Cole . Germany's tennis star of the 90s Boris Becker had it because of his hard and often match-winning service: boom-boom Boris. So it was also given to him by his fans out of respect.
Oh, I love that nickname! It is the same as my dad's. Everyone called him Sam, which I never understood because his name was Ronald. I had several nicknames, which he gave me. One followed me into adulthood, which a few friends called me. I was Chuck. Ok, there was Chuckles too. He had a whole string of names that he would go through. Charlie, Charlie Brown, (long explaination here-I was named for my Uncle Charlie Brown, and my little dog that just passed away was named Charlie Brown) Charles Brown, Charlie Chan, Charles Chan, Charlie Tuna, Charles Tuna, Chuck, Chuck the Clown, Chuckles, Chuckles the Clown. It was actually pretty funny.
My nickname so to speak was 'Red' for a while brought about by a fisticuff. But, 'for a while' was all there was, I dropped out of school in tenth grade. Of course, I wish I had toughed it out, but I had no guideness, and frankly, at tht time in my life, I was not smart enough nor intelligent enough to finish school. I simply did not have the background to earn passing grades and I thought it a waste of my daddy's money to do otherwise.
@Bess Barber In high school I was called Rocs because I played in a rock band. Summer after graduation when I played in a surf band on a west coast beach, the guys called me Chickie. That name carried over to my amateur beach volleyball days. The few old friends that knew me then still call me Chickie sometimes just Chick. In grade school I was Bunny because of sinus problems causing me to twitched my nose like a bunny.