EVANSVILLE — The Urban Dictionary has great fun with the name "John Smith," offering it alternately as an inference of facelessness, a pseudonym to elude authorities and the mark of the archetypal everyman.
A LinkedIn search for the name “John Smith” yields at least 100 pages of results. Google? Forget about it. There are millions and millions of entries.
But for one John Smith in Evansville, the name isn't a hastily chosen alias, a placeholder or a clumsy attempt to confer anonymity. It's a tribute to Smith's great-great-great grandfather on his mother's side, John Roland Adkins, who was born in Morgan County, Indiana in 1859 and died in 1927.
The 23-year-old Smith's full name is John Roland Adkins Smith. His mom, Crystal Smith, said most members of the family call her son, "John Roland." For the rest of the world, it's John.
And Crystal gets the humor of it. That her son would be "John Smith" despite the elaborate full name has always seemed kind of, well, inevitable.
"He would be filling out papers or signing his name in school, and he realized it was easier to just write 'John Smith,' Crystal said. "I think it was probably first or second grade. He’s like, ‘I don’t have to write all of this.’"
John Smith, a production assistant at WEHT/WTVW, has heard all the Pocahontas jokes and seen every variety — he thinks — of disbelieving and even skeptical facial expressions from people when he gives his name.
"When I started at (Channel) 25, everybody was making jokes that I was actually in witness protection," he said with a chuckle.
Other people say something like this: "There's no way. That can't be right."
"Why would I lie about that?" Smith said, still laughing.
Smith, a 2024 University of Evansville graduate, said it doesn't take too much convincing for people to accept that his name really is John Smith. He's never had to pull out his driver's license — but everybody's a comedian.
"Most of the time people are like, 'They really named you that, huh?'" he said with a laugh. "The other day we came back from Canada, and the TSA guy looked at my parents and said, 'Did you guys just get lazy or something?'" he said.
Along with the wisecracks, there are pros and cons of having a name so generic that people can't quite wrap their heads around it.
Online forms sometimes autofill with Smith's name, saving him the trouble of typing it in.
"That's kind of nice," he said.
But Smith remembers another online signup that turned into a bit of a rigmarole.
"It made me go through another verification process," he said. "I had to put my passport in or something like that. They just needed that extra verification."
Crystal Smith and her husband, Ben, have two other sons named George and Lincoln. Those are family names, too — but nobody inquires about them like they do when John's name comes up. Crystal remembers a salesman at a car dealership recently who couldn't help himself.
"He said, 'You named your kid John Smith?!’" she said. "We do joke about it. He's (John) always like, ‘Thanks, guys.’"
But the life of John Roland Adkins wasn't a joke, Crystal said. She said it does merit her son carrying it forward. John Roland Adkins was a farmer and a late 19th Century pioneer, one of 11 children. He is buried in Morgan-Monroe State Forest in Martinsville, Indiana.
John Smith of Evansville? He's never met another John Smith and doesn't quite know what he would say if he did.
Would his name any son of his John? No, Smith has a better idea.
"Actually, the name that I always liked that I would want to name my kid has always been Arrow," he said with a chuckle.
After the globally famous, hit-making rock band, Aerosmith. Aerosmith, Arrow Smith. Get it?
"That would be hilarious," Smith said.
But even if there is no Arrow Smith in Smith's future, it's likely there will be more yuks, more wisecracks and more incredulous reactions. The name is an attention-getter, colorful for its colorlessness. Smith embraces it.
"The fact that it ended up being John Smith is pretty funny, I'm not going to lie," he said.
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