SAN DIEGO — Miles Lartch has a bone to pick with America, and he’s willing to stake his name on it.
Earlier this month, the 63-year-old retiree filed paperwork at the Vista, Calif., Courthouse to change his name to kilometre miles 0.62137119224 Lartch.
For those in the know, a kilometer is 0.62137119224 of a mile. But that, Lartch said, is the problem. Americans don’t know the metric system, which has helped contribute to what he sees as a decline in our nation’s leadership as a scientific and world power.
“We’re the only country that doesn’t follow the metric system. Why? Because we’re very stupid,” he said on Friday. “America needs to know that someone’s willing to give up their Christian name and make it their middle name to prove a point. We need to stop allowing our country to sink into the toilet.”
Lartch is serious about his devotion to science, but he’s also known among his friends as a bit of a jokester. For decades, he’s been threatening to follow through with his name change plan, but nobody believed him. In fact, he didn’t even tell his longtime partner, Jeanne Chick, about the filing until this reporter showed up on their doorstep Friday afternoon to take his photo.
“Well, he does like to get on his soapbox,” Chick said, with a shake of her head. “He’s always been upset about this metric thing.”
Lartch spent nearly 45 years in the medical field, starting out as a Navy corpsman at Camp Pendleton in 1973 and then working at the base hospital and Tri-City Medical Center as a registered nurse in intensive care and emergency care.
In the world of medicine, drugs are always administered in metric doses, which he says is far more precise than the mishmash of measurements used in the United States.
Back in the mid-1970s, an effort was made to convert the U.S. to the metric system but it bombed. Lartch said he’s been steaming ever since about that failure and wanting to take a stand.
“Americans don’t want to learn anything new,” he said. “Instead, we bring over people from other countries on work visas to take care of our medical and scientific needs. It’s irrational. Nobody here encourages their children to learn math and science.”
The new first name Lartch has chosen, “kilometre,” is the internationally recognized spelling of the word “because,” he says, “we’re so stupid we can’t even get that right.”
And both the word kilometre and miles will begin with lower-case letters. That’s so when they’re abbreviated they’ll read “km,” the proper symbol for the metric unit.
Then comes the piece de resistance, the long series of numbers that shows how clean a single kilometer is compared to the messy, 5,280-foot mile.
To change his name, Lartch paid a $450 filing fee at the courthouse. Then he was required to publish intention of the change with a classified ad, which will run periodically over four weeks in The San Diego Union-Tribune. After that, he can head to the clerk’s office to seek the final OK.
If the change is approved by the court at the end of April, Lartch said he’s not sure what name he’ll go by with Jeannie and his friends. Maybe Kilo, maybe km, but he said it’s just fine if they still want to call him Miles.
“I’m an old fart,” he said. “They can call me anything they want just as long as they don’t call me late for dinner.”
