From: michael@adriaan.bu.edu (Michael Chaplin)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.dan-quayle
Subject: The Prince and the Pauper?
Date: 10 Sep 92 22:18:06 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Boston University

This is on the front page of
The Boston Globe of Thursday, Sept. 10th, 1992.
Enjoy.

===========================

VICE PRESIDENTIAL JOKES SPREAD TO A SECOND DAN

By Bob Holder, Globe Staff


It's not easy being Dan Quaile.

Living in the reflected ridicule of a vice-president with a propensity
for misspellings, miscues and malapropisms, Daniel R. Quaile endures
a daily ration of razzing- a co-worker asking him to spell potato,
a restaurant reservationist dismissing him as a joke or a perfect 
stranger asking about his wife, Marilyn, when her name is Colleen.

As Vice-President J. Danforth Quayle's phonetic namesake, Quaile
lives in such a shark pool for prospective pranksters that he keeps
his phone number unpublished and his name off his mail box.

And sometimes the consequences of the resemblance of Quaile's name
to the oft-derided vice-president's grow so tiresome that Quaile, 28,
a Boston architect who lives in Hingham, considers using the name 
Dan Smith.

As if he were a barometer of Quayle's public standing, Quaile's worst
days, he said, often follow Quayle's.

"Whenever he puts his foot in his mouth," Quaile said yesterday,
"that's when I get the most grief."

Henny Youngman, it seems, never had it so bad.

"There isn't a day that goes by when I don't get some kind of joke
about my name," Quaile said in an interview at a State Street cafe.

He has suffered from slings aplenty in the shadow of a national figure
who, among other things, has wrongly reprimanded a schoolchild for not
spelling potato with an 'e' at the end and has told members of the
United Negro College Fund: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind-
or not to have a mind."

Along the way, Quayle has wrangled with a fictitious television
character, Murphy Brown, over family values. And he has stressed the
Bush administration's commitment to child care by saying, "We
understand the importance of the bondage between parent and child,"
when he meant to say bonding.

One episode after another has thrust Architect Quaile into a comedic
crossfire, which he said has never become mean-spirited.

"Everybody kind of takes it as a joke," he said, "because they
consider him a joke."

One of Quaile's colleagues at DiNisco, Kretsch and Associates on
Summer Street last year gave him a postcard of Quayle's face with
the nose cut out so the card would fit over a light switch. Quaile
pinned the card to his office wall.

He has received letters addressed to "J. Danforth Quaile" from his
college roommates, who also have handed out personalized golf tees
that Quaile's wife had given him, telling their friends they had
golfed with the vice-president.

And there continue to be the inevitable quips when people first hear
Quaile's name.

"Oh, yeah, Dan Quayle," they say. "Where's George and the secret
service?"

In reality, Quayle and Quaile have almost nothing in common but
blue eyes and love of golf, which neither has been able to play
as much as he would like, because of work and other demands.

Quaile, who grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Windsor,
Connecticut, has never seen Quayle's home state of Indiana. 
And while Quayle represented Indiana in the U.S. Senate,
Quaile was attending Roger Williams College in Rhode Island,
where he steered clear of politics, as he does today.

Quaile described himself as an independent and said he could not
remeber for whom he voted in the 1988 presidential election,
although he recalled choosing "between the lesser of two evils."
He apparently cares so little about politics that he acknowledged
having forgotten that the Republicans had already held their 1992
convention.

However, Quaile follows the news closely enough, he said, to have 
some sympathy for the vice-president.

"I think he's taken a bit of a bum rap," he said. "Sure, he puts his
foot in his mouth, but so does everybody at one point. He just does
it more often."

Although Quaile said he generally has accepted the Quayle-related
barbs good-naturedly, he faulted the news media for providing much
of the fodder.

"I get tired of the razzing [of Quayle] after a while," he said. "But
you see the same stuff with every political candidate: who's sleeping
with whom, who's smoking pot and not inhaling, and all that baloney."

Quaile has yet to decide whom he will vote for in November, but he
said he would base his decision on the quality of the presidential 
candidates rather than their running mates.

However, he indicated Quayle would not get his vote should he run for
president in 1996.

"I don't think most people are comfortable with the idea of having his
finger on the button" of the nuclear arsenal, Quaile said. "I don't
think I would feel comfortable, either."

Still, Quaile expects his namesake nemesis to continue to haunt him.

"I'd rather have him out of the picture," he said. "But even if he
does not get re-elected this year, I know I'll still get the ribbing
for a while until he fades out of the limelight."

That means Quaile's colleagues may continue to inject humor into
meetings with potential customers by dropping Quaile's name. And
that restaurant reservationists will continue to dismiss him or to
call him later to make sure his request is not a prank. And that his 
brother, Michael, will get razzed as well.

"It happens all the time," Quaile said. "People tell him he's lucky
that his name isn't Dan."

=========================

"Yours for consideration...."
-Rod Serling

Chaplin.
--
===========================================================================
Michael Chaplin                    Language is a virus from outer space.
michael@albert.bu.edu                     - William S. Burroughs

The Einstein Papers Project        The opinions contained herein reflect
Boston University                      neither those of the project, 
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.          nor those of Albert Einstein.