I was a fan of Mike Mailway since the days when you used to be able to call him for advice by dialing the letters of his last name into the telephone.

Mike wrote a newspaper column that was a neat combination of odd facts and troubleshooting.

Mailway's breezy style made you laugh and educated you at the same time, and I have no doubt that this had an effect on many writers, myself included. He took an ordinary factoid and made it into a little treat.

"The heart of a newborn baby weighs less than an ounce, (what makes the heart heavy comes later)."

His real, given name was L.M Boyd, and he had a very long career writing for as many as 400 different newspapers around the country.

Mr. Boyd passed away last week at the age of 79 and his legacy is being carried on by his successor, Stanley Newman as "Mike Mailway's Trivia Bits."

For most of his time at the Seattle P.I., his column was written as a blurb, being only a few, pithy and witty paragraphs and sometimes including a couple of Q&A segments.

Here are a few of my favorites: "The original flag of pirates was plain red. Flag of ships carrying disease was the skull and crossbones. Pirates thought the disease emblem might scare off unwanted boarders so they took it for their own."

"All the Eskimo whalers at Greenland's Cape Horn make their harpoon blades from chips off the same chunk of iron - a 34-ton meteorite that fell there 10,000 years ago."

"'Manhattan' came from Indian words meaning 'high island,' according to most authorities. But it's also a matter of record that Henry Hudson in 1609 gave brandy to Indians there. It knocked them cattywampus. The chief passed out. They renamed the place 'Manahachtanienk' - meaning 'where everybody got drunk.'"

Boyd also made the useful suggestion that when you are antsy about having to wait at a traffic light, "think about things that get better with age, like wines and cheeses, your savings account."

In honor of Mike Mailway, I thought it might be nice to pay homage by illuminating our readers with some of my own, local if questionably accurate trivia.

In the early fifties, our Chamber of Commerce decided to officially name our town, Federal Way, a permutation of the Indian word, "Fed-dor-a-wa" which is Muckleshoot for "swamp-traded-for-good-land-by-bay.

The area underneath the original, historic Barker Cabin homestead was recently excavated (again) to reveal a collection of glassware and cups, circa 1880s with scientific analysis and carbon dating indicating traces of coffee, sugar and spices. This revelation makes the Barker Cabin Federal Way's first real java joint.

Was a time in ancient China when lanterns with manually-changed colored gels were used to control traffic. These precursors to this area's modern day invention were likely better synchronized.

If you want to discipline children the way our founding fathers did, don't spank them, make them peel cascara bark all day long to sell to passing motorists for "regularity."

The old Steel Lake School was burned down by firefighters as a training exercise, and Federal Way High School was nearly melted by the debate over Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth''

A dance hall at North Lake, you say? Well, not anymore, but back in the day there were Dance Halls all over the area. North Lake was one, run successfully by the Golden family. When they sold it to the Poore's, business began to fall off dramatically. You don't say?

I'll finish with one more real Mike Mailway quip:

"Some writers contend 'no word ever has the exact same meaning twice.' Maybe so. But 'hogwash,' I think, still means exactly what it meant the last time this subject came up."

Thanks Mr. Boyd.