No, not this message board. I’m talking about the newspaper columns and books this board is originally based on. What drew you to the writings of Cecil Adams?
I bring this up because author Katherine Dunn just died(which I previously mentioned in this post), and it was because I was looking for stuff that was similar to her style of smart-ass answerperson reporting that I stumbled across The Straight Dope at Powell’s Books here in Portland, way back in the 80’s.
So, what’s your story?
It was in the L.A. Reader, which I read regularly when I lived there.
How long ago did you first discover it, approximately?
Memory can be inaccurate, but I think I first saw Cecil’s column in the 70’s (maybe 80’s?), and I’m sure it was the L.A. Reader, as I was in L.A. for almost 30 years, and the* L.A. Times* certainly wasn’t cutting the mustard RE counter-culture.
I don’t recall the exact reference. I wanted to find out if Shane died at the end of the movie. Searching the internet for that answer somehow brought me here.
I found out about the straight dope 2 different ways
the first was a strange article that readers digest reprinted from somewhere else that brought up the whole thing about getting killed by a penny thrown off the empire state building and then talked about the sd and cecil in general
number 2 was aol 3.0 when aol was throwing everything it could on the wall and seeing what stuck and they had this thing where you typed “random” as a keyword and it would bring up a random page and the straight dope came up most often
(years later someone told me it wasn’t a true “random” search it just sent you to 5 or 10 of the lowest viewed pages on aol)
in fact I remember the big debate at the time was the 'pompatus of love ’ and there was a movie title and movie about it
then when aol was bought out they killed all of the more “mature” stuff off of it (IE the hub the urban legends page RIP legs urbano the ridiculous but good for a laugh live girl and buzzsaw )
then I seen there was a new website and a better mb and I was a poster til we had to sell the house and I just came back
A friend introduced me to the Baltimore City Paper–1980, it was–and there was Cecil’s column and I was hooked.
I found it to be pretty good, all in all.
I was a collector of trivia books so I’m pretty sure I bought the books first. When? I don’t have a clue. I discovered the Straight Dope column in the City Paper in the early '90’s.
A college roommate had a couple of the books. This would have been about 1990. Not long after that I found alt.fan.cecil-adams on Usenet. It says I joined here in 2001 but I must have lurked for a while before that because I have a text file with cut-and-paste thing I wanted to keep that has post from here dated 2000.
The short-lived TV show. I thought the show was hilarious and the host was cute and charming. I searched out and started reading the columns online. It was about a year or so before I even looked at the boards.
I saw the column in the Boston Phoenix in the late 1980s and later saw the books in a used paperback store.
Mid-80s in Folio Weekly in Jacksonville, FL. It became the only reason I sought out copies every week.
Then when I returned to Jax in 2000, I looked for the Straight Dope on line, and the rest is history.
In Walden Books in the early 90s I came across “The Straight Dope” in paperback and bought it.
Caught the A&E TV show in its brief lifespan. Then later saw the name in a Yahoo! link in '99 and followed that.
Started reading the column in Santa Barbara’s weekly alternative paper (don’t remember its name) around 1987-ish or so. I found it online about 1998.
Early 80’s - my Dad used to bring home the Chicago Reader home to the 'burbs form his job in the loop.
Links to the SD column from fark.com in the early 2000s.
Does your Dad go to da Loop? 
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Found link to a Cecil online column from a car enthusiast site I used to follow.