1069, Esq.

For the record he would like to be known as 1069 (pronounced One Zero Six Nine), but friends may call him "One Zero" for short. He wants society to recognize his right to use the four digits as his legal name rather than the one his parents gave him--Michael Herbert Dengler. After four years of unsuccessful attempts to get North Dakota and Minnesota authorities, the telephone company and a series of employers to identify him by his numerical name, Dengler, now 32 and a sometime short-order cook, last week sued for the name change in Minnesota's Hennepin County district court.

For Dengler each digit has an ingenious symbolic significance. One means, "I am part of the whole of life, which is one." Fair enough. But the others are more esoteric. Nine, for example, "stands for relationship to essence in the difference in the meaning when actualizing the spatially everpresent nature of life."

Minnesota law requires no reason for a name change so long as it is not for fraudulent purposes. The judge who heard the petition said he was impressed by Dengler's sincerity but could not rule until he had pondered whether a number could qualify under the statutory meaning of the word name.

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