Hail to the lesser-known trailblazers of the world

For as long as I remember — which right now is back to sometime around November 4 — we have celebrated those who became the very first to achieve historic firsts.

It takes a lot of courage to become the first man in space like Alan Shepard, the first man atop Mount Everest like Sir Edmund Hillary or the first to pilot a flying car like Doc Brown.

These men are all trailblazers, as are folks like Clyde Drexler, LaMarcus Aldridge, Bill Walton, Arvydas Sabonis and Terry Porter. Wait, never mind, those were Portland Trail Blazers in the NBA. Still impressive.

However, we do not give nearly enough attention to other trail blazers who accomplished impressive firsts that changed our lives.

For instance, who was the first person to drink milk from a cow? I don’t want to be sexist, but I guarantee you it was a man. No woman would look at an animal and consider drinking a liquid that came out of it. Heck, a lot of women won’t even eat perfectly good deer meat. But a caveman named Ugg probably lost a bet at the gallimimus races and was forced to crawl under some cow and have a sip while Thog and Gurp just laughed and laughed. It was also the first time a cow mooed.

“Not bad,” said Ugg. “In fact, I’m gonna try that brown cow over there and see if it has chocolate.”

(And, yes, I know our teachers tried to indoctrinate us into thinking that dinosaurs and cavemen did not exist at the same time, but creationist Ken Ham and “The Flintstones” have proven otherwise.)

You might think ingesting such things as butylated hydroxyanisole or candy corn or McNuggets into our body is a weird thing to do, but what about the first guy to eat salt? It’s pretty weird that somebody — again, definitely a man — decided to start eating a rock.

I suspect he was a rock eater like my 2-year-old granddaughter and that his dentist probably told him to lay off the granite and marble. I’m sure he got to wondering what kind of rock could flavor his lima beans and go around the rim of his margarita glass while also being able to make icy roads safer and high blood pressure worse.

Whoever that guy is, he has played a huge role in my life, and I thank him.

We know that the first guy to make a telephone call was also the guy who invented it — Alexander Graham Cracker Bell. Again, I’d just like to point out that it’s men doing all this trailblazing in case you thought that certainly it was a woman who invented talking on the telephone. I know — as a guy who hates talking on the phone, I was surprised to learn this myself. But we now know Bell’s first words through the phone were: “Watson! Come here! I want to see you! And bring the salt! I’m celebrating with a margarita!”

But did you know that Bell was also the second person to make a phone call, also in 1876 and also to Thomas Watson, the only other person in the world with a phone at the time? Watson only had that phone for a couple of days before Apple upgraded its operating system twice, and when the phone rang the second time with his “Sanford and Son” ringtone, he suspected it might be Bell calling again. Instead, it was another first for a male trailblazer — the first scam call.

“Watson?!”

“Yes?”

“Did you know your vehicle’s warranty is about to expire? Renew now by giving me your credit card information, social security number and mother’s maiden name.”

It was also the first successful scam call in history as Watson eagerly supplied the requested info despite the fact that neither credit cards, nor social security numbers, nor cars existed at the time. (Stealing women’s last names, though, was already invented.)

It’s also a little known fact that Bell died while on hold with his local CVS while trying to get a cheaper medicine for his blood pressure medicine.