Pauline Phillips, a California housewife who reinvented herself as the quick witted advice guru Abigail von Buren in 1956, died in Minneapolis on Wednesday. She was 94. She had been ill with Alzheimer’s for more than a decade, and her daughter, Jeanne Phillips, has been officially in charge of the column since 2000. After the column’s debut in the mid-1950s, the name “Dear Abby” quickly became synonymous with advice columnists and a certain kind of snappy humour. The column remains in syndication in over 1400 newspapers worldwide, and reaches about 110 million people via print and its website, dearabby.com. “Dear Abby” was also known for her long-standing rivalry with her identical twin sister and fellow advice columnist, Ann Landers.
Mrs. Philips was born in 1918 as Pauline Esther Friedman in Sioux City, Iowa, the daughter of a Jewish immigrant who went on to own a successful chain of local movie theatres. She and her twin sister attended Morningside College in Sioux City, where they both studied journalism and psychology, and wrote the school paper’s gossip column together. Pauline Friedman left college to marry her husband Morton Phillips in 1939 (in a lavish double ceremony with her twin, naturally), and as he was from a very wealthy family, she did not expect to find herself working. However, she quickly found that she was bored with the housewife life, and that “there has to be something more to life than mahjongg.” She helped train hospital volunteers for several years, until her sister Eppie (who died in 2002) took over the Ann Landers column at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1955, and she thought she could do better. She called up the San Francisco Chronicle one day and told them she thought she could write a far superior column than their current advice guru, and the “Dear Abby” column was born.
She is survived by her husband of 73 years, Mort Phillips, as well as their daughter Jeanne; four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
[via The New York Times]
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Megan Patterson is the Science and Technology Editor at Paper Droids and currently a Toronto Standard intern. She has also written for WORN Fashion Journal, Elevate, and Salon Magazines. She also tweets more than is healthy or wise.
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