From my "
person of the day" daily mailing. Persona@mercury.learningkingdom.com
Bill Nye, 1850-1896
This
journalist named the
newspaper he founded after a
mule.
From a small frontier town in the remote Wyoming Territory, his humor
touched a nation. Born Edgar Wilson Nye in Shirley Mills, Maine, he
used the pseudonym Bill when writing for the Laramie (Wyoming)
Boomerang, a newspaper he helped establish in his adopted hometown.
Nye had settled in Laramie in 1876 -- 14 years before Wyoming
achieved statehood -- becoming a judge while contributing articles to
the Denver Tribune and Cheyenne Sun. In 1881, with the establishment
of the Boomerang (named after a mule he owned that would frequently
attempt to follow him into bars, only to be shooed away and then
return "like a boomerang") his humorous tales found first a regional
and then a national following. Volumes of his writing later achieved
great popularity when published in book form.
In 1886, Nye took his comedic skills on the road, touring the country
and giving lectures with poet James Whitcomb Riley, whose
sentimentality proved the perfect foil to Nye's biting wit.
If you would like to learn more go to http://cyberschool.4j.lane.edu/~layton/biographies/n/edgarwilsonnye/edgarwilsonnye.html