Tubby Street, in case you want to look for it, is in Campbell and it is only about a block long. I'm not even sure any houses face the street.

I've always been fascinated by names.

As a newspaper person, one comes across a lot of odd names in one's working life. Many of them are people's names, some of them are streets or places. For instance, I've always wanted to go to Two Gun, a place in Arizona, not too far from the Tonto Rim. It's always seemed to me like the Lone Ranger must hang out there.

Arizona, as a matter of fact, has a lot of odd names: Snowflake, for instance (snowflakes are seldom seen in Arizona) or Organ Pipe (named for organ pipe cactus). California has Hayfork, Igo and Nono, and even Earp, which sounds as if someone upchucked, but which was really named for Wyatt Earp.

But then peoples' names are as fascinating as places.

I never met Rosebud Holler Milato, but I wrote her name once in a story long ago, about what I forget. Nor Stephanie Stonecypher (that has a nice ring, doesn't it?).

My favorite family, however, was the Cowherds, who once lived in San Jose. Perhaps they still do, although I think I once wrote an obituary for Powell Hill Cowherd. I always wondered if there were someone in the family named Lower Pasture Cowherd. Probably not, but it would have been appropriate, wouldn't it?

Then there's Featherfield Peacy III (I am not kidding) and the Overfelts. We always had to be careful with the Overfelts because there's a San Jose high school named for one of them and sports writers sometimes slipped into headlines mentioning Overfelt girls without really thinking about it.

Streets, of course, are easier to find. The problem in a place as large as Santa Clara County is that there are lots of streets, and for a variety of reasons it is not good to have streets with the same names. It is a trial for the U.S. Postal Service. It gets confusing if there is an Oak and a Pine street in every city in the county—and there probably is.

So developers long ago looked for names related to one another, but not to any other streets in the county. Developers tended to range from the prosaic to the weird in naming streets. The streets around my house, for instance, are named with the first names of relatives of the developer. In Santa Clara the city council members once had an orgy of naming streets after themselves. The streets, of course, are still there, but the council persons have long departed.

Another subdivision not far away has every street name preceded by Sunny: Sunnymead, Sunnyhaven, Sunnyway and so on. You know you're in the neighborhood when you reach Sunny—the problem is to find the proper variation.

And then there are those who give streets Spanish (or what they think are Spanish) names, as, for instance, Camino del Sol (the way of the sun?) or Enchanta Vista (I'm not sure that is Spanish and I don't think it is English either). We news people used to speculate that some developers gave their streets names in Spanish with an off-color meaning, but since we didn't speak or write Spanish we couldn't be sure. And why Spanish street names seem more elegant than those with English names also is something of a mystery.

Streets get named for wines (Chardonnay, Merlot and Burgundy), and for generals (there are bunch named for Patton, Eisenhower, Patch, Truscott, Bradley and other Army and Corps commanders of World War II). Usually, however, street names begin logically: First, Second, Third and so on, Main, Market. It's only when the town gets bigger than odd names begin to pop up.

Which makes me wonder what it would be like to have a street named after me.

It certainly would be unique. I don't know of a community anywhere in the United States that has a street named Heintze. On reflection, I can understand why. Firstly, neither I nor any of my family has ever done anything memorable enough to have anybody name anything after any of us. Secondly, almost no one ever spells Heintze the right way (with the "e" on the end). I have enough trouble getting people to spell it right at motels or on applications for loans or in medical records.

Imagine having to spell it twice, once as my name and once as a street address. So I don't expect ever to find anything—a street, a building, a park or even a bench—named after me.

After all, what's in a name, anyway?