My father’s first name was Willos. During more than five decades on this planet, I’ve never met another Willos.

Since most people called him Bill, it perhaps never occurred to me to ask the origins of his curious name. Maybe he came from a long line of Willoses and made a principled stand to break the chain.

Maybe he just accepted the name without inquiry, as a good lad should, and figured further thought might interfere with his fishing. Instinctively, my father knew no fish would care about his name.

My mother’s first name was Juanita. Ours is a big world with thousands of years of humankind, but I bet they might have been the only Willos and Juanita combination in recorded history.

I have no good reason to believe this. It belies my experience with names of preceding generations.

In my family tree, and usually at the reunions of my youth, there was a Verneal, a Howard, a Rudolph, a Lela and a Cecil. These are not names of startling oddity, but you seldom run into them in a first grade attendance book.

Further removed in the lineage, according to a family history on my mother’s side, there were distant kin with first names of Loys, Lura, Elmer, Elva, Zula and Zora.

In pictures of grainy black and white, the men had imposing mustaches and the boys had bow ties and short pants.

Clothing trends come and go in a lifetime. Unless your name is Brooks and you run a haberdashery with your brother, fashions please you for a time and then walk you down a path to embarrassment.

As a teen, I wore shirts dipped in paisley and pants with legs wider than some states. And I felt good about myself leaving the house.

(It would be my adult mission to destroy all photographs of those days, but I later learned my mother allowed no film in our cameras during the bell-bottom years.)

Point is, those days went away. But a name, just as much a fashion, stays with you from the maternity ward to the funeral home and beyond.

The Social Security Administration, to distract itself from the task of future solvency, released last week its listing of popular baby names for 2008. It made much of the fact that Emily, the female name most common the last 12 years, got bumped from the top spot by Emma and Isabella. Madison and Ava rounded out the top five.

On the male side, Jacob maintained its 10-year dynasty, followed by Michael, Ethan, Joshua and Daniel.

Around the time my mother was born, says the Social Security folks, Juanita was the 73rd most popular name in the country. It is now in 1,002nd place.

Willos has never been in the top 1,000 names.

My own name, Kenneth, enjoyed Top 20 popularity throughout my first decade of life, but now resides in the range of 136. The Haydens, Tristans and Josiahs all enjoy greater favor.

But that’s how it goes. Brayden is only the new Cletis, and Jocelyn the new Alma. Their days of status will pass.

It’s all the more reason to name a child Elvis … boy or girl.

Ken Newton’s column runs

on Sunday and Tuesday.