Catherine Winters in… The Case of Too Many Catherine Winters!
Recently, there’s been a lot of media interest in a woman named Melissa Huckaby — though not that Melissa Huckaby — and what it’s meant for her to be confused with an accused murderer and sexual predator: media attention, vandalism, death threats, etc, etc. Scary stuff.
I, on the other hand, share my name with a number of moderately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be serial killers or skinheads or anything terrible like that at all. That said, the most prominent ones tend to be fairly embarassing. So who are they? A couple other Catherine Winters have written embarrassing books, but that’s thankfully a lot better than it could be. No, my fellow Catherine Winters are pretty harmless.
The first Catherine Winters’ story is pretty tragic, however:
Nine-year-old Catherine Winters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A family friend named Dan Monroe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her Newcastle, Indiana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an outbreak of measles and Catherine had spent the morning playing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked gingham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.
They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mystery — was she kidnapped by gypsies? Did she run away? Her disappearance was covered in a 1913 silent newsreel.
Of course today, we can all guess what happened and it’s pretty horrifying. I really can’t fault her for having the same name, particularly when she met such a tragic end.
Second to her is a Catherine Winters who is also pretty hard to be irritated by. Catherine Winters of Lindon, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I figure she doesn’t need crazy people picking at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego linking to any of the sites that list a little too much personal info.
Catherine, if you ever read this:
- Tell your parents to think about password protecting some of those photos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
- Don’t let high school get you down in a couple years. In my experience, Catherine Winterses don’t like high school.
So, with the exception of Catherine Winters who disappeared in 1913 and Catherine Winters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:
There’s Catherine Winters, who in 1983, wrote a single entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Important People. I’ve had people ask me if that one was mine. (“Yes. Yes it was. I was a published author when I was 2 years old.”) I strongly suspect that this is the Catherine Winters who wrote for Young Miss magazine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writing for Health.com and is not as lame as previously asserted. Either way, it’s surprising that someone as prolific as this Catherine Winters could be eclipsed online by a book written 25 years ago.
[Update: May 28, 2009: Catherine Winters good-naturedly confirms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Catherine Winters have worried and doesn’t sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]
There’s a “Katherine Winters Hair Salon” in Irvington, New York. I’m not actually sure of the spelling of her first name, but apparently, the proprietor isn’t actually named Catherine Winters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writing, there’s only one extremely negative review available on Google:
“If she didn’t give me a bunch of attitude for leaving and offered me a discount to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”
Finally, there’s the Catherine Winters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Single and Loving It. In the author’s own words:
I wrote this book because I had experienced some shortcoming also in the area of being single and praying for the right mate to come my way after my journey on being single I am now happily married to a wonderful husband but if I had not stood still just for a second I also would of miss my blessing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to consider while your waiting on God and soul searching for what you want your mate to be.
You know, a lot of people look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legitimate’ or because you don’t have ‘editors’ or ‘proofreading’ and can have ‘problems’ with ‘grammar’, but to them, I say, balderdash! I’m ordering this right now.
So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even counting the myriad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a couple entertaining ones.
- In 2008, New Orleans resident Mary Catherine Winters, a nurse at Omega Hospital, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clinton.
- In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Winter won gold at the inaugural World Junior Figure Skating Championships. At two sentences in length, she has the shortest Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
- Kathy Winters, NASA Shuttle Weather Officer, gets quoted in the press all the time and apparently has the authority to scrub shuttle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
- Dr. Kathryn Winters, a pediatrician from New Mexico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s parent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.
Interestingly, Catherine Winters have a tendency to be fictional!
- “Catherine Winters”, “Cate Winters” and “Kate Winters” are all popular names in a variety of fan fiction: Twilight, (Damn it.) Smallville, Harry Potter, Boy Meets World, Doctor Who, and so on. The most blatant one of these, a Stargate SG-1 Mary Sue seems to have disappeared.
- Hilary Swank played Professor Katherine Winter in the 2007 film The Reaping, which I have not seen. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 9%, I have not made plans to do so. (Seriously, Hilary, who is your agent!? Most. Inconsistent. Career. Ever.)
- Kate Winters is the protagonist of Gerri Hill’s novel Coyote Sky, currently one of the top-ten books on Amazon’s ever-mercurial lesbian romance list. Unlike The Reaping, I have read this, and yeah, I’d say that ranking is fairly well-deserved. If your name is Catherine Winters, it might be weird to read though. I’m just saying.
- One of my personal favourites: “Catherine Winters” is the alias chosen by the protagonist of hetero romance novel Indiscreet by Mary Balogh.
Lady Catherine Winsmore, a heroine of quiet courage, refused a forced marriage when rape left her with an illegitimate child. Exiled by her family, she poses as a young widow, Mrs. Catherine Winters. An innocent smile brings the unwelcome advances of another rake, the Viscount Rawleigh, Rex Adams.
That’s super. Not only do I apparently have a name that makes me sound like a character from a romance novel, I have a name that sounds like a character from a romance novel made it up. Awesome.
Who shares your name?
7 Responses
to “Catherine Winters in… The Case of Too Many Catherine Winters!”
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Hey Catherine,
you know — the first time I came across your name on d.o or wherever it was, my first thought was “What?!?! Catherine Winters does Drupal??” And I was not thinking of any of the Catherine Winterses mentioned above but of someone I used to know back home in Dublin. I don’t think it would be fair of me to describe her in this public space, but anyway, there’s another one for ya :-P
As for Katherine Baileys, well there’s a model called Catherine Bailey (wife of the photographer David Bailey) and then there’s the Katherine Bailey who owns katherinebailey.com (“Katherine Bailey is an undergraduate planning student at the University of Waterloo with no time to maintain a personal website. :P ”) and is essentially the reason I am katbailey online. There’s also an artist and, very interestingly, an author of a book on sports motorcycles (I’m into bikes too, though not of the sports variety).
Katherine
Unfortunately no one!! Hence the alias. I wish I had a more common name, then if an employer asks if its me, well… makes it easy to set up vanity search feeds though!
Really, Katherine? That’s hilarious. (Amusing note: 3/4 people who have commented on this post to me so far on Facebook or otherwise have been Katherine/Kathryn/Katarinas.)
But yeah, I have to say, all these Katherine Baileys sound much more interesting than my doppelgangers. (Though, wow. Katherine Bailey from the University of Waterloo really DOESN’T have time to maintain a personal website, does she? Her Google rank’s about as low as you can get for owning the .com of your name!)
BTW: I like the new site design!
Yes, I am Catherine Winters–one of the big four. I wrote the Sweet Dreams book. (One has to start somewhere.) I worked for Young Miss. And I am the same Catherine Winters who today is considered prolific. Thank God for that; it means I am not as lame as you thought. I own the vintage sheet music of the song written about the lost Catherine Winters. And more than once, I have been told that with a name like mine, I should be writing romance novels! (No, I don’t read them.)
I did not write the self-published book, being Single and Loving It–let’s make that clear.
While the world is cluttered with Catherine Winterses, I cannot, will not change my name.
Why hello, Catherine Winters! I’m pleased to hear you confirm my guess – as intrigued as I might have been, I’m glad to have learned that the author of Sweet Dreams has gone on to do other Googleable things.
I actually feel somewhat vindicated that the “you should write romance novels” sentiment is one you’ve heard too. Rest assured, at no point did I come close to confusing self-published Catherine Winters with yourself! Still, it’s always good to make these things clear, I find.
Hi. I have been fortunate enough to have known Catherine
Winters of Young Miss fame for a considerable number of years. Certainly
in her gracious reply to your post, she greatly underplayed her talent and
accomplishments. Will you be posting your achievements? I look forward to
reading them.
I’ve known the “Young Miss” Catherine Winters since we went to college together at the University of Rhode Island, and I can vouch for the fact she is understating her achievements. Most recently, she was a Fellow of the New York Times for a competitive week-long symposium on advances in gerontology.