Oddly enough, having an episode about the Battle of Mamaroneck is one of those times when it pays to have grown up in New York.
I saw that note in our common research document, then I clocked the date and said to myself, “No way is Mike going to know how to pronounce that.” So I gave him a little coaching.
We’ve done this before, with each of us having to coach the other on pronunciation of locations when we have to report on events on the opposite coast (I get a lot of the Spanish West stuff, somehow).
The fact is, a lot of locations on the East Coast get their names from Native American words (Mamaroneck), or the Dutch (Catskill), or are just idiosyncratic because they’ve been around so long that the pronunciation has changed (Bowie, MD).
All of this has nothing to do with what I wanted to discuss here. This is what I wanted to discuss here:
In 1959 artists Eli Bauer and Ralph Bakshi created the cartoon character Hector Heathcote for the Terrytoons cartoon production company. Hector (seen at right in an image I totally stole) was an 18-year-old Colonial-era person with a red ponytail and a tricorner hat. Hector, and sometimes his dog Winston, got himself into various situations related to American History, though occasionally he’d wander into a science lesson. Sometimes he was opposed by a big bully-type named Benedict (as in Arnold, geddit?).
Anyway.
I saw that the alternate name for the Battle of Mamaroneck is the Skirmish of Heathcote Hill (like the historical marker says) and I wondered if there was any connection between Hector and this part of the world. It turns out that there may be!
Eli Bauer is from the Bronx, just south of Mamaroneck. Ralph Bakshi is from Brooklyn. And Terrytoons’ headquarters was in New Rochelle, which is about 10 miles from Mamaroneck as the crow flies.
Do with that what you will.
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