John Harvard, Canadian Parliamentarian

It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome for John Harvard when he swept into town a few years ago. At John Harvard’s brewhouse he couldn’t even get a drink on the house, even after the ultimate name drop. All he got was a book of matches. And he even managed to leave town without posing for an obligatory snapshot at the feet of the other John Harvard. “I haven’t been to the statue,” Harvard says. “I did buy all kinds of souvenirs. Magnets, steins. I could have spent thousands.”

This veteran Liberal member of parliament from Manitoba may wear his Crimson colors proudly, but he is not an actual descendant of John Harvard himself. In fact, he’s named after an airplane.

“It’s a very different branch of Harvards,” he says, going on to explain that it has nothing really to do with the Puritanical Harvards at all. “My parents came form Iceland. Our family name is rather difficult to pronounce,” he says, attempting to phonetically spell the Icelandic Heidman (his best attempt: hayth-man). Young John Heidman was given the middle name Harvard by his mother, who was partial to the Harvard training aircraft that the Canadian military flew at noisy intervals over their Winnipeg home. But when he entered broadcast journalism in 1959, he shed the unpronounceable trappings of his Icelandic heritage and went simply by John Harvard.

Harvard says he knew nothing of the good luck rituals associated with the Yard statue, but that he is not a superstitious man himself. “I consider the name a good luck charm. It’s a very nice sounding name. The Harvard name is a household name.”

It won’t, however, be a personage cast twice in bronze. “My legacy probably won’t be in the form of a statue,” the politician demurs. For now, though, he’s proud to have made the switch.

“It’s a great name. I had to make the decision rather precipitously early in my career. And I thought briefly that I might regret giving up my family name, but now I wouldn’t want any other name.” Apart from enjoying what he calls its “luster,” he also likes that the name appears to be just two-of-a-kind. “Wherever I travel, I look in the telephone books and I can never find another Harvard.”