Jeremy Butler

Jeremy Butler (April 24, 1873-June 5, 1960) was known for the mean slice he perfected on Throw Park's tennis courts, which he then adapted for his pickleball game.

Early life

Butler's first home, Brookdale Park, Bloomfield, NJ.

Butler was born on April 24, 1873 to an itinerant family who roamed the environs of Bloomfield, New Jersey. For several years, they lived on the tennis courts of Brookdale Park, which had been designed by the Olmsted Brothers. Once evicted from there, they squatted in a New Haven Quonset hut that had been abandoned by Yale University (now on view in the Quonset Hut Museum). Butler's affection for his time "at" Yale explains why he had its coat of arms sewn into every pair of undershirts he ever wore.

Butler's parents were Wrestling "With the Devil" Butler (1845-1929) and Polly Butler (née Starin; 1850-1931).

Polly descended from an elite American family, the Starins, who could track their lineage back to Nicholas Starin (aka, Staring; 1663-1759) and who once owned their own island amusement park (Starin's Glen Island) which was serviced by their own steamship line. Alas, Polly's branch of the Starins suffered a severe economic reversal during the Bloomfield Tulip Panic of 1792. They never recovered their social standing.

Jeremy's father, Wrestling "With the Devil", insisted the younger Butler be raised in a sect of wrestling Christians—The Church of the Sacred Sleeper Hold or Nomroms—who communed with their savior through strenuous Sunday morning wrestling matches. They wore masks, in the Lucha Libre tradition, because the Nomroms believed their true faces would offend God. Jeremy had the sect's equivalent of a bar mitzvah when, at age 13, he and his father tag-team wrestled two Nomrom deacons. Upon pinning one of the deacons, Jeremy was declared "a man." The Nomroms disbanded soon afterward, but Jeremy kept the mask.

Butler began his schooling at Tulip Lane Grade School, in Bloomfield, but the family moved again when he was in the sixth grade. Having served as a Union spy during the Civil War (code named "Dancing Otter"), Polly was entitled to a small pension and heard rumors of free land grants out west. And so the family relocated to land in Winesburg that would eventually become Throw Park and Butler became one of the Fightin' Servals at James A. Garfield Middle School. Butler attended Louis Althusser High School, which was later renamed David Émile Durkheim High School, and graduated in 1901.

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  Yale's coat of arms, which was emblazoned on Butler's undershirts. Lux et veritas = "light and truth."
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  Butler during his Quonset hut days.
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  The island amusement park of Polly Starin Butler's ancestors.
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  Artist's representation of the Bloomfield Tulip Panic—when fields of blooms (hence the origin of Bloomfield's name) were trampled by soldiers.
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  Wrestling "With the Devil" Butler (in blue) wrestles with a devil during a Nomrom service.

College

Butler was a defiant student at Defiance College (Indiana), which, despite its name, did not tolerate defiance among its student body. To this day, students still talk about the pranks engineered by Butler—including stealing boxer shorts from Dean Pappas's dresser and using them to spell "B-I-T-E M-E" on the College green. Butler prided himself on his record for senior-year expulsions (876), which is never likely to be matched. Dean Pappas was forced to repeatedly readmit Butler, because he was the only one of Defiance's 3,560 students who was paying tuition. The rest of the students were on tuition waivers due to a punitive law passed by the Indiana General Assembly that required Defiance to pay all but one of its students a $100 stipend for attending. During Butler's senior year, he was that solitary tuition-paying student—remitting $200,000 (roughly, $5 million in 21st-century money). The reason for the Legislature's punishment of Defiance is lost to history.

Butler was indebted to Defiance for the rest of his life.

Career

After graduating, Butler quickly established himself in the lucrative field of interpreters of Henry David Thoreau's work. He claimed to have read Walden 3,459 times.