Wabbits in History...

This morning I checked my eMail's and found one from Ticketmaster. I get these almost daily and I just scroll down looking for familiar names I might be interested in. Then I hit the delete key and move on. As I scrolled this morning, I was surprised to see a show called "Wabbits". Now, that has been my family nickname since I was a little girl. My memory is of Mimi, Papa, Junie, Neffice and me driving across the west and out on the plains seeing fields full of jack rabbits, we're talking oodles and gobs of jack rabbits, a veritable plethora of jack rabbits. Someone after that started calling Papa, Pa Wabbit and Mimi, Ma Wabbit, and us girls, the little Wabbits. When I wrote to Mimi and Papa (we didn't have eMail you understand) I always addressed the letters to the Wabbits. One time the mailman rang Mimi's doorbell and told her to tell me to put their names on the letter and not to put Wabbits. That never happened and they always got their letters. Papa just called and I asked him about his remembrance of how the family name of Wabbits came to be. His memory of this is different from mine. When Papa was a young man he worked for the telephone company. He was a lineman. Their crew had 7 linemen and 1 grunt to do the ground work. Papa and Baron LaBorde were very good at climbing the telephone poles so they did most of the climbing. Papa did very little of the grunt work (work on the ground) because he loved climbing and was good being on those tall telephone poles. He tells me that he and Baron LaBorde got to where they could come down those poles in 3 steps. This was frowned on by the telephone compnay (obviously!!). Papa said Old Man Beckan, their supervisor, caught Baron coming down a pole in 3 steps and asked him how he learned to do that. Baron, in his confession, included Papa as one with this ability also. I remember clearly hanging in our garage the spikes that Papa wore when he climbed telephone poles. They strapped onto the legs and outside of your shoes and you would plant the spike in the pole with a strap about your waist that you used to pull yourself up with. This would have taken a lot of strength and no fear of heights. Anyway, on with the story, Baron LaBorde was a cocky person (Papa's words). After Papa married Mimi, Baron would come to their apartment to visit. If Mimi needed to do something, Baron would say, "Let Daddy Rabbit handle it." From this beginning Mimi and Papa started calling themselves Daddy Rabbit and Momma Rabbit. As Papa and I talked it seems as kids we may have picked up on this and used the prnunciation "wabbit". and it went from there. Sooooo...this mornign I'm checking ticketmaster and find a rock and pop group performing called "Wabbits". Somehow I thought our family had this totally unique name. I decided to Google the word 'wabbits' and see if I could find the group. There were tons of uses of this word. I didn't find the band but I found lots of references to Elmer Fudd huntin' that waskely wabbit. Also some rabbit sales and breed stores. There were even rabbit jokes. There you have it...the origin of the Vernon Lawrence family name, Wabbits.