Bylines appearing in L&N Employees’ Magazine, a house organ of the Louisiana and Nashville Railroad, in the 1940s:

• R.R. South
• Steele Raylor
• Dick C. Lyon
• Lou Nash
• L.M. Lynes
• C. Ross Tye
• Lincoln Penn
• Cole Carr
• M.T. Hopper
• Rowan House
• Rowland Stock
• C.A. Boose

Thinking these fishy, writer Robert Rennick inquired of the railroad’s public relations department and learned that editor Julian James had barred any writer from receiving two bylines in a single issue. So they’d adopted these pseudonyms.

“The assumption was that no reader would ever imagine that these were real names. Yet, W.R. Heffren, writing as C. Ross Tye, once received a letter from a lady genealogist stating that she was researching the Tye family and would he kindly send her his family line to see if it could be related to hers.”

(Robert Rennick, “Fictitious Names,” Word Ways 37:1 [February 2004], 3.)