In 1959, Groucho Marx published an autobiography called Groucho and Me. It was a pretty funny book and if you never read it, I'd suggest getting a copy and rectifying that oversight. If you do, you'll notice a frequent usage of the name "Delaney." Every time Groucho doesn't recall someone's name or wants to change it for legal-type reasons, that person becomes Delaney. Here, scanned right out of a copy, is one such example…
I probably read this book around 1964 or 1965 when my love of the Marx Brothers was just starting to kick in. Among the many things I picked up from Groucho was the use of the name. As I began writing stories — published or otherwise — I often named a character Delaney or made reference to Delaney's Market or Delaney Avenue. It was as good a name as any.
When my friend Rob Solomon asked me to help him name his fanzine and to art-direct covers for it, I suggested it be called Delaney. The cover below at left is from one issue. Another friend, Dan Gheno, penciled this cover and I did the inking and all the lettering, including the Delaney title logo.
In a lot of the comic books I've written since I started in 1970, I've had characters named Delaney. One example of many was in a limited series I did back in 1993 with Sergio Aragonés called The Mighty Magnor. One of the heroes, as you'll see above right, was named C.J. Delaney.
A number of folks have noticed my repeated use of the name Delaney, which is fine with me. Better they notice that than my tendency to reuse the same jokes over and over. One or two of them have even noticed the most widely-seen usage of the name in something I worked on. Back on the seventies' TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter, reference was occasionally made to — and an actor once played on-camera — Mr. Kotter's old high school pal, Dino "Crazy" Delaney. Since I was a story editor on that show for a while, you'd probably assume that name came from me —
— and if you assumed that, you'd be incorrect. I agree that it seems logical but not everything that seems logical is so. I had nothing to do with the naming of Dino "Crazy" Delaney. In fact, he was mentioned on the show before I ever saw it, let alone worked on it. Just one of those coincidences.
Still, two or three times in my life, someone has made that deduction to me and I have to tell them they're wrong. A few months ago, a fellow who says he's doing a book on Welcome Back, Kotter wrote me not to ask me any questions whatsoever about working on the show but to verify that I, as he'd brilliantly deduced, must have named Dino "Crazy" Delaney. When I told him I hadn't, we got into a very silly e-mail argument with him telling me I had to be wrong because I had this pattern of naming characters Delaney so it was, as he put it, "absolutely, totally obvious" that I had named the character. I'm not sure if I convinced him I didn't. We'll find out if/when this book comes out.
But where did the Delaney come from? Well, one of the producers when I worked on Kotter was a clever guy named George Yanok. Many years after that show, I was browsing through my buddy Lee Goldberg's book, Unsold TV Pilots, and I noticed that a year or two before, George had co-written a TV-Movie/pilot called Delaney…
It starred Ed Lauter as Bud Delaney, a private eye in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler tradition. So did George name Dino "Crazy" Delaney? Well, isn't it "absolutely, totally obvious?"