I received an invitation here at The Daily Star a few days ago addressed to Ms. Kary Brunswick. It wasn’t a joke, but after going through decades of name and gender confusion, I just had to laugh. I hadn’t seen my name spelled that way before.

It’s likely the SUNY Cobleskill Foundation got my name by phone rather than in writing from the college’s public relations staff, and just went in all the wrong directions when transcribing it.

When I was young, gender never seemed to be a problem, but since Cary is a bit unusual, I was always being called Terry, Gary, Harry, Jerry or Larry. I especially disliked Gary, because one of my best friends in school had the name.

It was uncomfortable and a little embarrassing to be introduced publicly with the wrong name because you never knew whether to correct the speaker at once or just let it go. As time passed I learned to let it go after too many exchanges like this:

"Sir, that’s Cary, not Terry."

"Oh, sorry, that’s Gary Brunswick."

"No, I said Cary."

"Cory?"

"That’s Cary. C-a-r-y. Oh, never mind."

I never could understand why a simple four-letter word could be so confusing. And as a generation went by and well-known people with the same name such as the actor Cary Grant and the golfer Cary Middlecoff passed with it, the situation has become worse.

My name, in fact, was given because my mother liked it, not because she wanted to cause problems throughout my life. It wasn’t one of those "Boy named Sue" things, like in the Johnny Cash song. She heard of it from movies starring Cary Grant. She didn’t really like him; just the name.

In high school, most times I heard the name it was for a girl, as in the Hollies song "Carrie-Anne," or maybe for a horse, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Carry Back in 1961. It didn’t help that an older cousin named his daughter Kerry, which is basically pronounced the same.

I didn’t meet another Cary until college when a namesake was in our group for a while. He was much larger than my 120 pounds at the time, so he became known as Big Cary and I was Little Cary. I can’t say I minded much when he moved on.

Once I started working for newspapers as a news editor, a lot of news releases sent through the mail came addressed to me. Regular people, local, state and national organizations and public relations firms all got my name in a one way or another. However, they got it, they often got it wrong like the Cobleskill Tech foundation mentioned above.

Up until a few years ago, people at the Upper Catskill Community Council of the Arts would send notices for gallery exhibits or other events to Carrie Brunswick. I always wondered how they could think I was a woman, since I’d been at The Star for many years and knew many of the staffers there.

I’ve been Carrie a lot through the mail, but also Carey, which is a popular spelling of my name with some of my in-laws, though I’m sure it’s not intentional. Probably the best one I ever received was addressed to Garry Brownsworth. I knew they meant me.

I can handle the misspellings as long as those in the dark omit the gender title for whatever reason. When I get the Ms. or Mrs. in front of the name, even if they got the name right, I lose patience because it shows careless assumptions being made.

Over time, however, I learned to put the somewhat understandable gender confusion to good use as sort of an initial test for job applicants. You’d be surprised what an issue it has become the past few years.

When we have reporter or copy-editor vacancies, I place ads in various publications and websites for journalism jobs. Applicants must send their letters, resumes and work samples to me at The Daily Star.

Such applicants theoretically have no way of knowing whether Cary is a man or a woman, though I don’t recall ever hearing of that spelling used for a female name. So, applicants can avoid gender references, call our switchboard and ask, check our website where my photo should leave no doubt, or make a guess.

I would say that during the last few years about half of all applicants, especially the recent college grads, send their credentials to Ms. Cary Brunswick. Not a good way to impress a managing editor and earn a job interview.

Our thought is that we don’t want reporters and copy editors who make such a wrong assumption. We want people who would check it out first to make sure they were right, or at least play it safe by writing around the gender issue.

There was a time, perhaps, when even a photo wouldn’t have helped solve the gender question. I have to admit that after growing long hair in college, my father’s first reaction when seeing it was to call me Karen. But even that’s better than Kary.

———

Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.