After Two Years On City Council, Rick Callahan Says Call Him Rickey

Well, it turns out that the city councilman who the general public has known as Rick Callahan since he was elected to represent District 5 in 2013 actually prefers to be called Rickey Callahan. This is incredibly awkward. The councilman recently changed his official City Council name—which appears on the...

By Amy Martyn

July 16, 2015

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Well, it turns out that the city councilman who the general public has known as Rick Callahan since he was elected to represent District 5 in 2013 actually prefers to be called Rickey Callahan. This is incredibly awkward.

The councilman recently changed his official City Council name — which appears on the city website and on a placard in front of each councilperson at meetings — from Rick to Rickey. Callahan says that Rickey is his real name. But when he was first elected, he wanted to keep his name on the placard short. "I was busy," Callahan says, "I said, 'I don't care, use Rick'." Callahan says that people who know him well already call him Rickey, though constituents can call him whatever they're comfortable with — be it Rick, Rickey or Councilman Callahan. People in his life have also called him by the nickname "R.D.," and a basketball team he coached called him Mr. Rick, says Callahan, who was puzzled that we were interested in his sudden name change. "I didn't realize it would cause such a big deal," he says. The moral of this story is that it's never too late to correct that coworker of yours who has been getting your name slightly wrong for the past two years.

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