This is what the ‘M.’ stands for, and here’s why I use it

(Update, Dec. 30, 2015: The CMS issue has been resolved, and the M. is finally gone!) 

This blog was dead for about three months while I tried to work out a DNS conflict with my host. It’s back now only after I decided to throw in the towel and park it at WordPress.

To celebrate this auspicious return, I thought I’d answer the question I’m most often asked: Why the hell is your byline M. Alex Johnson?

Until about four years ago, I thought journalists who tacked an initial in front of their name — an initial initial, so to speak — were pompous. Then two things happened:

Bye, Mom

Myrna Faye Cambron Johnson was born March 8, 1939, in Birmingham, Ala., the only child of Edward and Myrtle Cambron. She died April 2, 2011, in Lilburn, Ga., her home of 35 years.

She grew up in Alabama and attended Birmingham Baptist Hospitals School of Nursing (now the Ida V. Moffett School of Nursing), graduating in 1960.

As part of her training, Myrna traveled with her class to north Florida that year, where she went on a date with a local boy. That boy was not Mel Johnson. But he introduced her to Mel — and that was the biggest mistake of that young man’s life.

Mel declared to his buddies the next morning that he was going to marry that “cute, beautiful woman” who looked more than a little bit like Elizabeth Taylor. “I had made up my mind,” he says.

Three weeks later, he up and married her. That was 51 years ago.