The Portland daily press., 1892-01-25
The Value of Names.

6rotting stock, extensively advertised
as ''bred by Bonner" and on his own
farm, was not a remarkable financial
success. This only shows that a man
may be famous as q trotting horse
owner. driver and even shoer-for Mr..
Bonner claims to be the only man in
America who understands horses
feet and knows how horses should
be shod-and not be notably successful
as a breeder. 1t was Mr.. Bonner'S first
sale, and the horses. with one or two
exceptions, brought only fairly good
prices. That the sale attracted atten-
ton at all was only because it was
s.Bonner's," and this illustrates the
value of mere name. Yet it is the
knowledge, or appreciation rather, OF
the worth of names as names that was
the foundation of Mr.. Bonner's
fortune. Extensive advertising was
merely adjunctive, so to speak, to
the big name boom. Mr.. Bonner told
friend of mine, years ago, little Incl
dent, which never before has appeared
in print, that when he was a boy, set
ting type in the old Courant office at
Hartford, he used occasionally to in
dulge in the composition-pen, not type
composition-of q paragraph or brief
essay in moral tone which he would
modestly put on the editors desk.
These little flights, assumed to be tex
tracts were credited to Charming, or
some other great name, and they in
variably were put with other good
miscellany into the paper; whereas,
had they been signed by the real writer,
they would have gone into the waste
paper basket. This impressed upon
the youthful Bonner the worth Of
names, without regard to the matter,
AMI when he bought and began to make
family paper of the then little Ledger,
he literally went for" names. Begin
ming with s'Fanny Fern" an ephemera1
celebrity, whose writings were of mush-
room growth and duration only, he ran
through the whole list of celeb
rites and secured them as contributors
Look at the list of great names
Everett, Longfellow, Bryant Beecher,
Greeley, Dickens, Bishop Clark, DR..
John Hall-these are but a 1.-THE of
them. And all the pen productions
furnished by these writers were the
most palpable potboilers, written solely
for the large sums which the profusely
liberal publisher paid-not for the pro-
ductions-but for the mere names of
the writers. This shrewdness made
the Ledger known everywhere and
made Bonner rich. Of course, the
liberal advertising-an art in which
Bonner as an adept was second only to
Barnum-spread the fame Of the paper,
by and through the names of the
notable contributors; but, after all, the
names did the business. There is
scarcely notable writer in England or
America who has not been at some
time or other contributor to the
Ledger.
Family Names in New York.
Apropos of great names, it is discov-
cred that they have some value in the
''smart set" known as the -Four Hun
bred. But not many of the names in
that set, as family names, will bear
tracing far back. It is certain, for in
stance, that Mrs. Roberts-Vivian is not
even distantly connected with the blue
blooded Salem Endicotts, and her claim
to belong to that family has prompted
some malicious person to discover that
she is the daughter of a respectable
chandler of that name. 1t is said that
when she was last in London, having
wildly asserted her claim to be one of
the Massachusetts, Endicotts, Mrs. Joe
Sc of ;nro ,,
daughter of the ex-secretary of war,
was wrathfu1 in the extreme. 1t was
during this same London sojourn that
Mrs Marshall o. Roberts, as she was
then, suddenly dropped the CO." as her
notes and invitations came to her adj
dressed ''O'Roberts. ''and she wanted her
new English friends to know that her
husband was at least from English
stock and not from some other part of
the United Kingdom. So anxious are
these representatives of the -Four Hun
bred to be as English as they can any
how. The English hyphenation of
names is becoming fashionable and a
conspicuous example of frequent men
ton in the society columns in the Sun
day papers is the new family name
Bradley-Martin, and we hear every
week of the dinners and doings of the
''BradleyMartins." This is precisely
as if the universally known, if not the
universally esteemed, John Smith, upon
arriving at riches and the consequent
social distinction derivable therefron,
should suddenly convert his breed and
brood into the famous family of ''John-
Smiths" Mr.. Martin, whose Christian
name is Bradley, is the son Of an Al
bapy Bradley, who began professional
life as a lawyer and who made large
fortune as a banker. This fortune
his son Bradley inherited and has
considerably increased, for he is a
thoroughly shrewd and smart bust
ness man. He is college man,
too, thoroughly well educated, was adj
nitted to the bar and gave every promise
l.o;,,rr n c,,oooccf17l &c not no 10 rafaG