Jeremy Butler
Jeremy Butler was known for the mean slice he perfected on Throw Park's tennis courts, which he then adapted for his pickleball game.
Early life
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Butler was born 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,[1] 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.[2] Alas, Polly's branch of the Starins suffered a severe economic reversal during the Bloomfield Tulip Panic of 1792.[3] 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.
References
- ↑ Ironically, Butler's great-great-uncle was briefly engage to Emily Olmsted, the Brothers' great-aunt.
- ↑ William Leete Stone, The Starin family in America : Descendants of Nicholas Ster (Starin), on of the early settlers of Fort Orange (Albany, N. Y. ) (Albany, NY: J. Mursell's Sons, 1892. https://archive.org/details/starinfamilyinam00ston
- ↑ Less well-known than the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1630s, the Bloomfield Tulip Panic was nonethless disastrous for at least five families in central New Jersey.
