Tradition is a strange thing.

From Homecoming (1910) to the Marching Illini (1904) to The Daily Illini itself (1871), most of the school’s longstanding groups and events pride themselves on a legacy rich in honor, reverence and proud history.

But between the broadsheet pages of this very newspaper exactly 100 years ago today, a different kind of tradition was born.

When Daily Illini columnist Carl Stephens and editor H. H. Herbert published the first Campus Scout on Sept. 19, 1911, honor was hardly the name of the game.

The Scout was created for many reasons. Having lacked a consistent humor column since “Bubbles” ran in one predecessor to the current incarnation of the DI, the monthly Illini (a brief appearance by “The Chuckler” in 1910 failed to catch on), Herbert was convinced that he needed a paper with all the proper trimmings — including a laugh or two. And as Stephens wrote in a 1921 retrospective, editorships were rapidly filled that fall, and his friend didn’t want to leave Stephens without a spot on the paper.

While the column has taken many forms over the years — its current form being, well, nonexistent — its core concept remained the same: a humorous and often satirical look at campus life, whether told through DI writers or local contributors.

Former Scouts act as much as a band of exclusive club members or fraternity brothers do. Each has a favorite former Scout, collection of death threats or memories of barely legal incidents. Nor can you talk to just one former columnist; like a game of six degrees of separation, almost every Scout knows another Scout (or five) and is more than capable of explaining exactly what made his brand of humor different from the rest.

Steve Perlman (Scout ‘88-’89) remembers when he nabbed the job on the advice of a former features editor.

“You had to have the legs to (write) the column throughout the year. I had already been a columnist, so that helped me, definitely,” Perlman said. “I approached it like set pieces … I would actually think about that; what’s the theme of this week’s column? And I kind of got carried away — I basically took over the features section every Thursday.”

David Allen (‘85-’86), meanwhile, took his Scout history seriously. His attention to detail and history even led him to publish a Scout retrospective on its 74th anniversary.

“I revived the idea of the column being penned by a sort of Indian scout and wrote in the third person, just as older Scouts had,” he recalled. “I dug up one of the original logos from the 1920s to impart a classic feel and for the same reason sometimes used vintage photos, such as student registration in the 1950s.”

As might be expected, some Scout writers found careers in comedy writing or entertainment.

Larry Doyle (Scout ‘78-‘79), a novelist and television writer who has contributed frequent pieces to “The New Yorker,” penned several episodes of “The Simpsons” and written the book “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” is noted by other Scouts as a revivalist of the column’s popularity.

“I went for just a straight humor column, because it was the only thing I knew how to do,” he said. “It was amazing back then how angry you could make people. People threatened to kill me … I did think I might get beaten up.”

Doyle brought a rebellious spin to the column, reflecting his clash with popular culture at the time.

“If you looked at the larger national culture while I was in college, it was rather pathetic and embarrassing to be part of it. I did not choose to be part of a disco generation … Made me wish that I had been there during the 60s,” he said. “It just seemed like leisure suits were going to be the end of it all.”

If Doyle’s generation recorded a tumultuous nation in flux, Gene Shalit’s (Scout ‘47 – ‘48) reflected a simpler time.

“There were about 8,000 total kids on campus. It as a different kind of place, different kind of world, none of the nonsense of technology,” he said. “If you wanted to talk to somebody, you called them up. If you wanted to write someone, you wrote them a letter.”

Shalit, now iconic for wearing bowties and an oversized handlebar moustache during his lengthy career as a film and book critic for NBC’s “The Today Show,” says columns at the DI and clever witticisms were commonplace — prior to Scout, Shalit talked sports in a column titled “What Shalit Be?” During his turn as Campus Scout, Shalit would bring in everything from politics (calling out congressional witch hunts that attacked socialists during the era) to funny stories about students.

“It was very reader friendly because nothing was abstract,” he said. “It was about what was going on on campus.”

Although the column hasn’t run since 2004, its legacy is hard to doubt.

“It held up a mirror to school life and through gossip, wit, sarcasm, satire, silliness, pranks, puns and occasional subversiveness, demonstrated that the University really is mostly just a collection of 18 to 20-somethings gathered in the middle of a bunch of cornfields trying to figure out how they are going to muddle through the few years they have there before being thrown out into the rest of their lives,” Perlman said. “The column was levity and reassurance to students while just about everything else the University threw at them was just the opposite.”