I worked at a YMCA camp for many years. When parents signed their kid up for camp, they received an informational packet and some forms. The informational packet included some tips on how to make sure children came home with as much clothing as you had packed for them. One of those tips was to label shirts, pants, shorts, and towels with the child's name. Some of the parents who hadn't decided a priori that such labeling would be depressingly futile ordered personalized, iron-on labels through a coupon provided by the YMCA. Others squeezed their kid's name or initials in permanent ink onto the tags already present on the clothes.

Dustin Chipchase's mom didn't believe in such subtle approaches. Indeed, she found the prospect of loss so alarming that she took a laundry marker and emblazoned her son's name in letters at least an inch high across the front of everything he was to wear. Nor did she believe in things like "spacing out the letters" or "centering." On some garments, she wrote the name right under the neckline (see figure 1). On others, she found herself short on horizontal space. When she reached the right margin of a shirt, she simply turned it over and finished up, which meant that "Chipchase" ended up looking rather like a hiccup (see figure 2). Clearly, such results disappointed her, but it seemed that making the letters smaller was out of the question. Instead, when she ran out of room, she continued on a second line, with the text flushed right. It was important that she never do something as straightforward as hyphenating after "chip" (see figure 3).

We had a game, a bunch of us camp-staff-types, that we used to play on days off or when the season had just ended. We would sit in a circle with glasses full of something cheap and alcoholic, and we'd toast to campers. The idea was to come up with the name of a kid who was either famous or infamous in camp circles, and creativity was a good thing: It was better to toast to the kid who had talked the exchange counselor from Russia into letting their cabin group roast "marshmallows" made of cotton balls soaked in rubbing alcohol—and then top off the evening off with a panty raid—than to toast to the kid who couldn't seem to keep her cornmeal mush out of her hair. Dustin Chipchase's name often seemed to come up towards the end of those games. He was a trump card, a laundry-marker legend, a signal that it was time to move on to a game that didn't require all the players to drink on every single participant's turn.

I was wondering today what had become of him; he must be in his early twenties by now. So I Googled him.

My search - "Dustin Chipchase" - did not match any documents.