Back in March, Miles Lartch caused a bit of a national stir when he filed paperwork to change his name to kilometres miles 0.62137119224 lartch.

It was the Vista retiree’s colorful way of making his point that America’s position as a world leader in science is in decline because it never adopted the metric system.

Lartch, 63, doesn’t like America’s singular and contrarian use of old-fashioned measurements like inches, pounds, yards and miles. His new name, he said, would show how inexactly a kilometer equates to 0.62137119224 of a mile.

Some people thought he was crazy. Some cheered his plan from as far away as Montreal. But others thought he’d never go through with the plan. They didn’t know him very well.


“People think I’m weird,” he said. I am pretty weird. They’re stumped by my shenanigans. But this is something I’ve wanted to do for many years and I’ve finally done it.”

In April, a Superior Court judge in Vista approved the name change and on May 17, the federal government officially recognized it by mailing out a new Social Security Card. Now he’s applying for a new passport, driver’s license and Medicare card.

So how does it feel to have a new and confusing name that’s so long it doesn’t even fit on a standard Social Security Card? About the same as before, said Lartch, but he’s happy to have made his point.

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.

The new first name Lartch has chosen, “kilometres,” is the internationally recognized spelling of the word “because,” he says, “we’re so stupid we can’t even get that right.”

The words kilometres and miles 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 long series of numbers that shows how clean a single kilometer is compared to the messy, 5,280-foot mile.


Lartch’s longtime partner, Jeanne Chick, said she’s still getting used to the new name and she’s taken a great deal of ribbing from her friends. “I don’t give them an inch,” she said, offering some non-metric humor.

But the new name has been happily accepted by Lartch’s fellow choir members at the Palomar Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Vista.

On the back of his old “Miles Lartch” nametag they’ve printed a new moniker, “km lartch.”

Now that the name issue is finally settled, Lartch is moving on to other interests. He’s working on a pinpoint needlepoint for charity, working out twice a week with a fitness trainer and is growing out his nearly shoulder-length gray hair for donation to the children’s cancer charity Locks of Love.


How long will Lartch’s hair need to be before it can be cut for donation? Exactly 30.48 centimeters, he said with a smile.

Court paperwork and a Social Security Card showing Miles Lartch’s recent name change to kilometres miles 0.62137119224 lartch. (Pam Kragen/San Diego Union-Tribune )


pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com