Three-year-old Kent holding one-month old me, sitting with 18 month old Brad in our house in Newton Highlands, Mass.

I was born Saturday, August 8, 1953 at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, about ten miles outside of Boston. I found out later there were many more successful adults born there including John Krasinski and B.J. Novak from The Office, Matt LeBlanc, Jack Lemmon, and Robert Preston to name a few. My parents were 26 year-old Robert Kent Butler Orton (Bob) and his 23 year-old wife Joyce Ardith Darling Orton. I had two brothers, Robert Kent Butler Orton, Jr. (Kent) who was three years old, and Bradford Lee Ross Orton (Brad) who was only a year and a half old. My sister Lisa Cheryl Orton (later Arge) would be born eight years later. To be consistent with the family practice of males having three names, I was named Mitchell Marc Lindsey Orton. I wasn’t named after anyone in particular – they were just considered to be cool names at the time. Marc in particular was a very popular name then, though not spelled the same. As of this writing, every Mark/Marc I know was born in the 50’s and early 60’s. The name was so popular in fact, my parents decided to go with the flow and call me that. It was an annual ritual on the first day of school to hear the new teacher call out “Mitchell Orton?” to giggles in the room. The only person that continues to call me that is my clever sister-in-law, Holly Fineberg. My 8th grade teacher, Mr. Hugh McCotter, realized I hated it, and never missed an opportunity to torture me by calling me that the entire school year. In my 5th grade classroom, there were six other Marks. At work today, there are at least a dozen in my building. Ironically, I did not have a single Mitchell in any class, at any job in my career. Go figure!

For a brief time we were living in a Cape Cod-style house in Newton-Highlands, Massachusetts. All three boys shared a bedroom in the dormered second floor. I don’t remember anything about the house, but I have seen pictures. There was a friendly young family two doors down, The Johnson’s, who would impact our lives 25 years later. A few months after my birth, we moved to a larger home in Auburndale, a section of Newton not far away. Newton was then, and still is, a highly desirable and expensive place to live. For you trivia buffs, it is also where the name of the cookie Fig Newtons comes from. The company who originally created them liked the idea of naming their treats after local towns.

NEXT UP – My father, Boston Bob