We're happy to present this story from one of our favorite sites, YourTango. Today we're gleaning some wisdom on love from America's most iconic advice columnist.
Her name was Pauline Friedman Phillips, but you might better recognize her as "Dear Abby."
She wrote under the byline Abigail Van Buren for almost 50 years, offering answers to some of our most compelling questions about everything from smelly spouses to disastrous dates. She went by Abby among family and friends (plus 90 million or so devoted readers) her entire life and she died last week at the age of 94.
Phillips started out as an advice columnist back in 1956 when she was a stay-at-home mom of two. She contacted the editors at the San Francisco Chronicle after reading an advice column that ran in the paper, boasting that she could do a much better job.
"They gave her a bunch of letters, thinking that they would never see her again — and she immediately took all of the letters to my dad's nearby office and whipped out answers and had answers back the same day," her son, Eddie Phillips, told Good Morning America. "That knocked them off their feet."
Even though she stopped writing some time ago (she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease), her legacy lived on in her daughter, Jeanne Phillips, who took over the column in 2002. The columnist was always modest about her star status as a writer, which is what made her so relatable as America's most iconic advice columnist.
"I don't pretend to be an authority on journalism or on human relations," Phillips said. "I just happen to be a very happy, a very healthy, a very lucky young woman with a fascinating hobby."
