George Kelly.✳

Philadelphia supplied this George Kelly; Broadway supplied the stages. A writer, performer, and director, he brought The Torch-Bearers to Broadway in 1922 and The Show-Off in 1924, before Craig’s Wife opened in 1925 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the following year. He also staged that original production himself.

His name continued returning to Broadway through revivals, including a 1992 production of The Show-Off. Grace Kelly was his niece, but the easiest introduction to his work is a script with his own name on the cover. The Torch-Bearers, his comedy about amateur theatricals, is available to read in full.

A person walks into the world with a theory about it. George Alexander Kelly made that an organizing idea of psychology. His personal construct theory described people as developing, testing, and revising ways of understanding experience so they could anticipate what might happen next.

Before the two volumes of The Psychology of Personal Constructs appeared in 1955, he had taken psychological services to schools in western Kansas through traveling clinics. He later directed clinical psychology at Ohio State and moved to Brandeis. Among these namesakes, he is the George Kelly to visit when the question is how the same world can look so different to different people.

This George Kelly already has a hall of fame. The six-foot-four first baseman known as “High Pockets” helped the New York Giants win the World Series in 1921 and 1922. In 1921 he also led the National League with 23 home runs; three years later, he drove in 136 runs.

His career included a detour to second base in 1925, making room for Bill Terry at first. Cooperstown elected him in 1973. The numbers tell one version of the story. Another survives in the Hall’s archive: a recorded conversation with Kelly from April 1983, less than two years before his death.

An airfield carried this George Kelly’s name long after his brief flying career ended. Born in London in 1878, he emigrated to the United States, served in the Army, and entered its early aviation program. On May 10, 1911, he died in an airplane crash at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

Six years later, a new flying field near San Antonio took his name. Kelly Field became one of the country’s primary flight-training schools during the First World War. His entry is a small doorway into a much larger history: the years when military aviation was still being worked out, flight by flight.

Every namesake collection eventually reaches the awkward introduction. George Kelly Barnes, better known as “Machine Gun” Kelly, belongs here for notoriety: he and his gang kidnapped oilman Charles Urschel in 1933, and federal agents and Memphis police captured him that September.

The familiar story has him surrendering with a cry of “Don’t shoot, G-Men!” The FBI’s own historical account says he probably never said it. Its earliest report describes a quiet arrest, while the memorable line emerged later. That gap between an event and the story attached to it is the revealing detail here. Even an infamous name can arrive with unreliable subtitles.