"Call me Ralph," said "Killer" Klein's plain-speaking son.
He may present himself as a plain-spoken son of Wyoming who eventually went on to become the no-nonsense CEO of a global company.
But that is the job that will soon be handed to Mr. Weldon, a plain-speaking son of a Broadway stagehand and a seamstress, who has spent virtually his entire working life at the company.
Instead, the central government has found itself battling an improbable adversary: Osaka's mayor, Toru Hashimoto, the young, plain-speaking son of a yakuza gangster who has ridden Japan's loss of faith in government to become, seemingly overnight, the country's best-liked politician, according to recent polls.
But, admits the 50-year-old Shoen, the bald, plain-spoken son of U-Haul's founder, Leonard, "I can't control them".
The most controversial name, Colonel Sieminski notes, was Masher, the nickname for a "sweep operation through the Bong Son Plain".
It was all a very long way from Salford, near Manchester, where he had been born as plain Alfred Cooke, the son of a metalworker.
One more example of the disgraceful side of journalism: I was photographing dead Americans following a firefight on the Bong Son plain.
The fact that in any aristocratic family concubines outnumber wives five to one, and the convention of taking the will for the deed by adopting an heir makes it plain that the Son of Heaven must have some pretty odd relatives.
It is possible for an intrepid traveler to visit the Ia Drang Valley or the Bong Son plain, much as old soldiers and their descendants visit Omaha Beach and Bastogne; and it is possible, too, to inspect the fortifications at Dien Bien Phu, where the French came to such grief in 1954.
