Pauline Phillips, the woman behind America's trusted
advice guru Dear Abby, died Wednesday in Minneapolis. She was 94.
Phillips, a longtime resident of Beverly Hills, Calif., had been ill with Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade.
The Dear Abby column, started by Phillips in 1956, became a forum for the public discussion of private problems. Her smart, tart-tongued advice rang true for millions of people in hundreds of newspapers around the world. Phillips' daughter, Jeanne Phillips, took over the column unofficially in 1987 and officially in 2000.
Her
New York Times obituary reprinted some of Phillips' best advice from her tenure.
Dear Abby: My wife sleeps in the raw. Then she showers, brushes her teeth and fixes our breakfast — still in the buff. We're newlyweds and there are just the two of us, so I suppose there's really nothing wrong with it. What do you think?—Ed
Dear Ed: It's O.K. with me. But tell her to put on an apron when she's frying bacon.
Dear Abby: Two men who claim to be father and adopted son just bought an old mansion across the street and fixed it up. We notice a very suspicious mixture of company coming and going at all hours — blacks, whites, Orientals, women who look like men and men who look like women. This has always been considered one of the finest sections of San Francisco, and these weirdos are giving it a bad name. How can we improve the neighborhood? — Nob Hill Residents
Dear Residents: You could move.
The Times also reached out on Twitter asking readers what they considered to be the most helpful advice Dear Abby dished out over the years. Here are some of the responses:
One commenter posted what he believed to be "most important, if hardest" lesson of all: "Stop whining!"
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