This is the issue I worked on, my first week as a volunteer at The Onion. I am not pictured here.
We received a very earnestly-worded letter to the editor and I think it was the first time many of us (not entirely me, as I had gotten a crash course in what was being jokingly referred to — by the activist left, where the phrase originated; before it got coopted by the centrists and the right — as “political correctness”) had been asked to think about these issues. I have to give credit to the activists who make stirs about stuff like this, you got to us early and made a difference all the way 35 years in the future. We still made fun of you — that’s just who we were — but we were always on the same side.
“Layout Guru and Hi-tech Wiz” was someone else’s idea. When I was given the opportunity (the very next issue) they allowed me to change my job title to “Layout Technology Thaumaturgist” which remained my title throughout my tenure. There was a long conversation about it in the office that week which included multiple attempts to get a laugh out of the joke (stolen shamelessly from Dragon Magazine), “You thau my ’turgist, I’ll thau yours.”
Oh, and that “Jonathan Hart Eddy” character was me.
