There is that famous line in “The Boy Inventors’ Wireless Triumph” (Richard Bonner, Hurst & Company, NY, 1912) which reads Boys, exclaimed Professor Chadwick proudly, that’s what I call a real wireless triumph!
More than a half-century after the good professor’s pronouncement – on February 2, 1973 to be exact – an equally triumphant event occurred, with the publication of the first Straight Dope column. Which means that today the whole world celebrates 32 years of Uncle Cecil’s Anti-Ignorance Triumphs, conveyed through weekly columns, five book collections, and an Internet message board. As we all are well familiar, in “The Boy Inventors’ Vanishing Gun” the boy inventors invented a rapid-fire gun that made airplanes vanish (by shooting them down). And Unca Cece has done the same, except his sacred mission is to make ignorance vanish, by “shooting down” misinformation and fallacies.
The last Boy Inventors volume appeared in 1915, while Triumph of The Straight Dope, the most recent Straight Dope collection – the allusion to the earlier Boy Inventors volume is obvious – appeared in 1999. And we fervently hope that the gap before the appearance of the next collection of Cecil’s brilliant opuses will not match the length of the current drought for a new Boy Inventors book, because the Cubs – a professional baseball team based in Chicago – are doomed to never again win the World Series until another Straight Dope volume is published!.
Mike Lenehan was Cecil’s original editor, so he gets the credit for introducing Cecil to an unsuspecting but eternally grateful world. But he (Lenehan) bailed out pretty quick, while Ed Zotti, Cecil’s third and current erstwhile editor, has been on the scene for the last 27-odd years. It would be remiss not to honor Mr. Zotti for his own non-negligible efforts in keeping the Straight Dope editorial ship on course and its gears greased and lubed, so I have written a small tribute:
My name is “Little Ed”.
I wear the name with pride.
Me and Uncle Cecil fight ignorance.
I am by his side.
Spelling and punctuation may seem stoic,
But cutting and pasting can be heroic!
Don’t worry, that tribute’s not copyrighted or anything, but if you wanted to pay me for the rights, or set it to music, or something, well, that would be okay too.
All Hail Uncle Cecil! etc., etc.
