Q Do you have a nickname?

Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.): “It’s Queen. [Former Rep.] Carrie Meek gave it to me. It’s said affectionately, sort of,” she says, laughing.
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) explains, “I heard Carrie Meek refer to her as Queen Corrine. I think she went to Africa at some point and they did a ceremony to make her a queen. If you can’t be the king, then being the queen is a dominant force in the legislative process.”

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.): “As a kid, my great-grandfather called me Buck, my father called me Bo and my uncle called me Bub. All my peers called me Bo in those days.”

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.): “Kiro. My dad came back from the Army and nicknamed me. He said he didn’t want me to be called Junior. Imagine — my mom still calls me that, [as do] my sister and my aunt. No one called me Luis or Louey.”

Rep. Bill Sali (R-Idaho): “Weelow. I had a cousin who lived in Georgia who had a friend named Weelow Harris. He’d tell stories about him. Weelow got himself into sticky situations. They’d say, ‘You’re just like Weelow Harris.’ I never met him.”

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas): “Cookie. It was a kid thing. My Uncle Charles nicknamed me that. There is no telling if I ate cookies a lot, but it ended when I got to secondary school.”

Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.): “My buddies called me Feen. They still do.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.): “Pablo. Just because it was just the way it was. Pablo was a stable boy, a character in a story. Just a regular country boy. He wasn’t a drunk or anything.”

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.): “My mom called me Twonker, from a book about a robot.”

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.): “Buster, because I was a Junior. There’s no easy nickname for Roscoe.”

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.): “When I was in high school, they called me Swede because I was Swedish. It was OK. Some people called me Ace. None of them were official.”

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.): “My middle name is Lance, so some of my friends used to call me Lance.”

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.): “Not to be repeated. I played [football] with a rough group of guys.”

Rep. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.): “I was a twin, so I’m just glad they got my name right.”

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.): “Suave. Debonair. Good-looking. The kids in the neighborhood used to call me Ack Ack.”

Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.): “Candy. I used to be called Candy, but when I ran [for office], I thought it sounded a little too trivial.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.): “Doc. I liked being the guy who carried the First Aid kit in Boy Scouts.”

Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.): “It’s the Filster, the Filibuster and Punxsutawney Phil.”

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii): “Mr. Wonderful. You haven’t heard that? Or … The Gym God.”

Rep. José Serrano (D-N.Y.): “My family calls me Pito, short for Pepito, which is Pepe, which is a nickname for José. Ileana [Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.)] calls me Pepito.”

Rep. Marion Berry (D-Ark.): “Ralph Hall [R-Texas] calls me Mayor because of my name.”

Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.): “I had a nickname in college. [It was] Spike. I think on “Happy Days” Fonzi had a friend named Spike. I was a rough-houser.”

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho): “All my golf buddies call me Buddy. My brother and dad called me Moose. In dental school they all called me O.J., but that was when he had a good reputation. Later, in Blackfoot [Idaho], nobody called me that, which was good, because he killed his wife.”