What's a Zheutlin?

Tuesday November 17 2009

Greencastle Indiana is a bit out of the way on the Bloomington-Indianapolis route, but I took the detour so I could have lunch with David Gellman, a history professor at DePauw University.  His specialty is slavery and the Civil War.  And he's Barbara Zheutlin's first cousin because his mother is BZ's father younger sister.

We had a delightful lunch at Treasures on the Square, a quaint and cozy diner-like place, where the white-haired ladies at the next table played bridge or some other card game after they ate lunch.  It's that kind of place.  And the Greek salad was enormous.

Once we started swapping celebrity stories, he beat me with the following.  In 1984, back when David Letterman was still at NBC and did a weekly reading of selected letters he received, he read one from a lawyer who quoted a tortuous sentence construction and asked Letterman what two words meant (I think the words were like "thungafroid" and "hazendropy" or some such).  Letterman read the sentence with the words in question and then looked into the camera and said "I don't know what they mean.  What I want to know is 'what is a Zheutlin.'"  Because the letter had been written by Peter Zheutlin, cousin of David Gellman's and our own BZ. 

So, folks, what's a Zheutlin?  Letterman's still waiting to hear.