Circa 1973 or 1974, I opened the Chicago Reader and there it was. Was Cecil’s editor at the time Mike Lenehan or Dave Kehr? I was a young adult with a dry, okay, sarcastic "wit"and I discovered a kindred spirit. Mike Royko and I were no longer alone in Chicagoland.
ETA: At the time I had abandoned my plan to be the Next Royko, but a column in a crappy “alternative” free paper? Seemed do-able. Took me some time and the intervention of the internet, but I managed to join the SDSAB for a while.
Could I have read Cecil’s column in the 70s in college? That’s my memory. A whacky Q&A column in the alternative newspaper.
In the early 80s I was seeing the column in the City Paper (Washington DC)
For me, I think it was this thread. I was researching about cold temperature and the human body or something.
I saw mention somewhere of (the first?) book when I was a kid in the eighties, maybe in Science Digest or some book, and it sounded very interesting.
edit: Possibly it was mentioned in an advertisement in a magazine.
I was aware of the column shortly after finding the SDMB. I came to this version of the MB close to the start in '99, and I was on the AOL version for some time before that.
So, I found out through the message board.
I was aware of the column since at least the 80s, it was (is?) in DC’s City Paper. One time, I wrote him an email asking a question and the autoreply suggested I ask it here. I remember it was just like a couple of weeks after it had stopped being exclusively an AOL thing (if I remember that correctly). I also remember that I forgot my user name/password and created Madmonk28 a while later, so I guess I’m a sock for a long forgotten poster.
Loved those books too. David Feldman wrote me back once and answered all the questions I gave him, even ones that never ended up in the books and when he did use one of mine and my name was in the book it was a huge thrill for me.
I stumbled on the books at the library. When I eventually got online I wanted to ask a question and so found the website (where I did get my question answered via email), and from there, the message boards.
I first discovered the column while I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in Isthmus, the city’s alternative newspaper, around 1985 or 1986. Like several other posters, this was also where I discovered Life In Hell, as well as the cartoons of Lynda Barry. I found the first two books of compiled columns in a bookstore soon after.
Upon moving to Chicago in '89, I started reading the column in the Chicago Reader, then stumbled across the AOL forum around 1995.
I found the first book in the store in the university town we lived in at the time. When we moved to our current area, we stumbled across the City Paper, which carried the columns - woohoo! It was always a struggle to find a copy though.
I first saw the StraightDope in the San Diego Reader in the mid-1980’s … I started following The Master religiously in 1986 in whatever rag the University of Iowa students were publishing at the time. Quite a few goats died until I realized He wasn’t arriving in exactly the way I thought He would.
The hook for me was a nice tidy little column every week in a newspaper just wall-to-wall hippy …
In the late 1970s, in the Baltimore City Paper. I became a fan of the column, bought all the books, and submitted a question that Cecil actually answered. (Sometime before that, a friend of mine who worked at the City Paper put my name on a question in the column that someone had asked, thinking I’d be pleased. I don’t remember the question, but I wasn’t.)
Years later, I submitted another, which Cecil didn’t answer, but C. K. Dexter Haven replied and suggested that I ask the SDMB, which I hadn’t heard of before. That’s how I got here.
I’d never heard of the Straight Dope articles in the various newspapers until I came across the MB here.
Being an Aussie, it was unlikely I’d encounter it…