Hook, Line, & Sinker?

I’ve always been fascinated by business entities—mostly law offices, financial firms, and advertising agencies—whose names are a list of the principal partners. Such names have always possessed a certain poetry for me, and I loved to recite them aloud. The classic, which I came across in my childhood, was Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne—an ad agency whose name the comedian Fred Allen famously said “sounds like a trunk falling downstairs.”

Nowadays, the firm usually goes by BBD&O, which has much less romance to it.

Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Beane was another wonderfully named company, until Smith replaced Beane, and eventually it became known simply as Merrill Lynch, and was then gobbled up by Bank of America.

Law firms are prime examples of polynominalism.  Among the best are Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld; and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Accountants were no slouches in the multiple-name department. Touche, Ross, Bailey & Smart led the pack, followed by Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery; Deloitte, Haskins & Sells; and Peat, Marwick & Mitchell. Mergers have destroyed the magic, and now instead we have plain old Deloitte or a monstrosity like KPMG. For shame!

Growing up in Houston, I was entranced by the names of law firms such as Vinson, Elkins, Weems & Searls (later either Connally or Smith was added); Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman & Bates (later plus Jaworski); Baker, Botts, Andrews, Shepherd & Coates; Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Bradley (later plus Jones); and  Butler, Binion, Rice, Cook & Knapp.  When switchboard operators answered the phone “Butler Binion,” it always sounded to me as if they were saying “Butter beans.”

My alltime favorite, which managed to squeeze six partners’ names into the title, was Hill, Brown, Kronzer, Abraham, Watkins & Steely.

The Houston ad agency of Goodwin, Dannenbaum, Littman & Wingfield was also a gem, too often shortened in common parlance to GDL&W.

When I was an alleged student of philosophy at The Rice Institute way back when, our textbook had a chapter on German philosophers, several of whom I thought should have gotten together and formed a firm. It would have been called Schlegel, Schelling, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Schleiermacher. Now that’s poetry!

Poetry is an alien term to the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, whose verbiage is something else—although no one knows quite what.

            Trump, McConnell, Ryan, & Pence,
            All, by repute, Republican gents,
                        Were first against Moore,
                         Then said they were for--
            But wished they could stay on the fence.