Her mother, that "old lady," responded by saying, "I don't really think there is.
Ann Landers’ daughter Margo Howard dishes and advises in her own way in new book
But you were raised around it. If you're awake, you can't help but learn from what's going on around you. It is not an issue between mother and daughter that Howard has chosen not to follow directly in her mother's footsteps. That matter was settled more than two decades ago. And it is hard work, contrary to common perceptions. The advice business is a daily parade of sadnesses, personal crises and plaintive pleas for help, many of which, because of the sheer volume, cannot be answered. Their daily doses of problem-solving advice are read by as many as million people every day.
They have met popes, presidents and other assorted potentates, and they are frequently ranked among the most influential people of the last half of the last century. Sharp as ever and she can still get into these St. John's suits and she'll say to me, 'I'm wearing a Bill Blass suit from 30 years ago,' and I'll say, 'You wretch. The mothers keep in close contact, mostly faxing each other daily notes, comments, bits of family news and gossip.
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The famous feuds that kept them estranged for years in the s and again in the s have been put behind them, but some of the battle scars remain. How could they not? Think of some of the troubles that afflict ordinary siblings. This might be the ultimate sibling rivalry. The sisters are still quietly competitive, each claiming the larger readership.
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There are no faxes between Howard and Jeanne Phillips. No phone calls or letters or e-mails. They share only memories and even those are open to interpretation. The Story of Ann Landers. I do remember that she had a terrible asthma attack once. I do know that I always looked up to her, she was sophisticated.
Me, she probably thought, was a pain in the butt. A couple of book publishers have expressed interest in publishing a collection. A national magazine has been flirting with featuring a print version. The appetite for advice is insatiable and always has been. As long as there have been problems The guy in the next cave keeps borrowing my rocks and won't return them , there have been people willing to offer advice Hit him with a rock the next time he comes over. But for many millennia, professional advice was available only to pharaohs, popes and kings, and only recently on analysts' couches.
Free advice could always be had from tavern keepers, clergymen, neighbors or parents. But professional advice wasn't widely available to the masses until the latter part of the s when newspapers, inventing such circulation-building novelties as comics, started featuring columns that addressed the concerns of the lovelorn and the otherwise troubled.
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Read about the poor saps who are worse off than you are. The advice business really took off in , when several newspapers started running a syndicated column labeled "Dorothy Dix Talks. As was the custom for women in the business at the time, she had chosen an alliterative pseudonymous byline, and she proved adept and clever in addressing the problems of ordinary people.
The column was a hit, expanding to six days a week in papers with a potential readership of 60 million. Its immense popularity spawned imitators but none were as successful. When Dix died in , many believed the advice business would never see another major national star. She was the mother of teenage Margo, who was attending Francis Parker School. Except for helping her husband when he sold pots and pans door-to-door, and volunteering with local Democratic organizations in Wisconsin, Eppie Lederer had never held a job. A fan of the Ann Landers advice column that was running in the Sun-Times, she called the paper and offered her services as an assistant to "Miss Landers.
What immediately set her work apart from that of the 27 other women competing for the job--and from those doing advice chores at other papers--was that she used outside sources. To answer the sample questions supplied by the paper's editors, Lederer called a couple of pals she had met during her political work, Supreme Court Justice William O.
Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University. Their words gave the column the heft of authority and a dash of celebrity, and the result was impressive enough that some editors suggested she had made up the answers. But the use of outside experts won her the job and has distinguished her work ever since.
Lederer, who had not written a word since winning a high school essay contest, was nurtured in her new job by a hard-drinking, chain-smoking editor named Larry Fanning. He helped her expand her network of experts and cultivated her native wit. Here's the response to the first letter she printed, from a Mr. Don't be surprised if you wake up one of these days and wish you had your wife and sons back. You are flirting with a muddy track on Black Friday, and the way you're headed, you will get exactly what you deserve. The number of readers and letters swelled.
The first person Lederer recruited to help her with the mail was her sister, then living outside San Francisco. But that arrangement ended after a few months when Pauline decided that she, too, was going to get into the advice business. Without telling her sister, she persuaded the San Francisco Chronicle to let her write an advice column under the byline Abigail Van Buren.
Unlike people who tend to go after the same kind of personality in all their relationships, Howard married four very different kinds of men. She had her key growing-up years with her mom being just a stay-at-home, nurturing parent.
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Her great fame came when I was a fully, grown-up adult, when I was in college. I was down at the paper saying hello and spent some time talking to [Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist] Bill Mauldin. Margo is her own person, she is in no way in your shadow. Subscribe for unlimited digital access. Follow me on Twitter billzwecker. She related to her readers as if they were old friends. She seemed to say exactly what she thought, even when doing so might hurt the feelings of those seeking help. For example, early in her work a young person wrote to ask Ann Landers opinion of sexual activity among teenagers.
As Ann Landers gained fame so did many of her words. People began to repeat some her short, pointed sentences. Ann Landers did not protect herself from such criticism, however. She often published letters from readers who argued against advice she had given.
When she agreed with their criticism, she sometimes ordered the forty lashes for herself! Ann Landers took a lot of risks in her column. She spoke out about many issues that some people considered offensive or socially unacceptable. She discussed homosexuality, alcoholism, drug dependency and mistreatment of children by parents to list a few. Ann Landers also spoke out on political issues. She expressed her strong opposition to American involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. She was a major supporter of gun control and the right of a woman to choose to end a pregnancy.
She also supported using animals in medical research. These opinions made her an enemy of several groups, including the National Rifle Association, abortion opponents, and animal protection organizations. But, their pressure did not appear to worry Ann Landers.
In fact, she once said she felt proud that these groups hated her. Her political activism was sometimes powerful. She expressed her support of legislation for cancer research in her column in nineteen-seventy-one. President Richard Nixon received hundreds of thousands of copies of the column from Ann Landers readers. He soon signed the one-hundred-million dollar National Cancer Act. Her husband, Jules, told her he was involved with another woman. That relationship had been going on for several years. Mister and Missus Lederer separated. She had always advised couples to stay together to avoid hurting their children.
After her separation from her husband she wrote a column about her decision to end her marriage. She received tens of thousands of letters from her readers offering their support and sympathy. Ann Landers continued to suggest that a husband and wife in a troubled marriage seek counseling. But she was now more willing to consider that a marriage might be beyond repair.