Six Candidates Compete for Southpaw of the Year Title

David Letterman, Goldie Hawn, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, Greg Louganis and George Bush are all an arm’s length away from winning a left-handed compliment.

“We just counted the ballots” and the six have received the most votes to become the 1989 Lefthander of the Year, says Kim Kipers, executive assistant of Lefthanders International.

The Topeka-based group will name the winner in late December.

Winfrey won the honor last year and appeared on the cover of LI’s Lefthander magazine, which reads from back to front. The columns start on the right side of the page and run to the left.

Each year, LI’s 27,000 members vote for their favorite lefthander in eight categories: general sports, tennis, male and female entertainers, music, soap operas, politics and overall Lefthander of the Year.

Poking Fun at Superstition

The 13-year-old group created Aug. 13 as International Lefthanders’ Day for the estimated 10% of the world’s people who write and eat with their left hands. LI, with members nationwide and in 14 other countries, chose that date because the first International Lefthanders’ Day fell on a Friday the 13th.

“They did it to poke fun of all the superstitions surrounding left-handedness,” Kipers said.

“We’ve come a long way as far as dispelling myths,” she said. “They used to, in the Middle Ages, put the left hand in boiling water to discourage its use.”

Kipers, a right-hander, said Missouri school teachers in the late 1930s and early 1940s tried to get her left-handed mother to switch hands.

“Teachers used to hit her knuckles with rulers, tie her hand to her side to keep her from using it,” Kipers said. “Teachers and the educational system seem to be more aware that that is not a good thing to do so we don’t hear much about that anymore.”

LI publishes a catalogue of hand tools, scissors, knives, can openers, playing cards, spiral notebooks and even pens for the estimated 24 million American left-handers.

No. 1 Complaint

“The big thing as far as kids go was writing over a spiral--our No. 1 complaint,” Kipers said. “We have quick-dry ink pens so you don’t smear ink on your hand when you write. We even have cork screws for the lefties.”

Righthanded card players typically fan their cards with the uppermost card on the right, exposing the markings in the upper left corners. No markings are visible to a person who puts the uppermost card on the left and fans the rest of the cards to the right.

LI’s cards have markings in all four corners, “which are great for everybody,” Kipers said.

Smaller companies have been the most receptive when approached about making a product for left-handers, Kipers said.

Bigger companies “don’t really see a market for it, even though you’re talking about 24 million people. You’d think that would create some dollar signs in their eyes.”

Famous lefthanders include Bob Dylan, Jimmy Connors, Ted Koppel, Oliver North, George Burns, Marilyn Monroe and Mark Twain, according to LI’s list.

The name of former sportscaster Jayne Kennedy is on the list but has been marked out. The problem is that published lists of famous lefthanders are wrong about one-third of the time, Kipers said. Someone apparently assumed Kennedy was a leftie because she starts her stretching exercises by bending to the left, then to the right, she said.

But Kipers discovered the error by watching a television show. “I saw her on ‘Win, Lose or Draw’ and she wrote with her right hand.”