Pauline Phillips

Pauline Esther Phillips (née Friedman; July 4, 1918 – January 16, 2013), also known as Abigail Van Buren, was an American advice columnist and radio show host who began the well-known Dear Abby newspaper column in 1956. It became the most widely syndicated newspaper column in the world, syndicated in 1,400 newspapers with 110 million readers.

From 1963 to 1975, Phillips also hosted a daily Dear Abby program on CBS Radio. TV anchorwoman Diane Sawyer calls her the "pioneering queen of salty advice". She was also the paternal stepgrandmother of U.S. Congressman Dean Phillips.

Pauline Friedman, nicknamed "Popo", was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Russian Jewish immigrants Rebecca (née Rushall) and Abraham B. Friedman, owner of a chain of movie theaters. She was the youngest of four sisters and grew up in Sioux City. Her identical twin Esther Pauline Friedman (married name Lederer), nicknamed “Eppie”, was columnist Ann Landers. Lederer had become Ann Landers in 1955, and Phillips soon followed suit by launching her own advice column.

Phillips graduated from the now-defunct Central High School in Sioux City. She then studied journalism and psychology at Morningside College, where she and her twin sister wrote a gossip column in the school newspaper. The column was called "The Campus Rat", and they used the pen name "PE-EP", inspired by their names Pauline Esther and Esther Pauline. Both sisters were married in a double wedding ceremony on July 2, 1939, two days before their 21st birthday. Pauline married Morton Phillips of Minneapolis, and had son Edward and daughter Jeanne.

Phillips' writing career began in January 1956 when she was 37 and new to the San Francisco area. She phoned the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and said that she could write a better advice column than the one that she had been reading in the newspaper. After hearing her modest credentials, editor Stanleigh Arnold gave her some letters in need of answers and told her to bring back her replies in a week; Phillips got her replies back to the Chronicle in an hour and a half. In an interview with Larry King, she said that she had no work experience, lacking even a social security number. The editor, however, asked if she was a professional writer. He said that her writing was "fabulous', and she was hired that day.

She went by the pen name Abigail Van Buren, combining the Old Testament prophetess from 1 Samuel with President Martin Van Buren. Her twin sister was the author of the Ann Landers column, and the competition created acrimony between them for many years. In 1956, Phillips offered her column to the Sioux City Journal at a reduced price, provided that the paper refuse to print her sister's column. The sisters ostensibly reconciled in 1964 but remained competitors. They became "the most widely read and most quoted women in the world" in 1958, according to Life magazine.

Newspapers had included gossip and personal columnists for more than a century, but the two sisters added "something special", according to Life, in that they were the first to publish letters and replies covering a wide range of personal problems, replying with "vaudeville punch lines" rooted in common sense. The editor of the Chicago Sun-Times described their skill as "beyond mere shrewdness—a quality very close to genuine wisdom."

With her comic and flinty yet fundamentally sympathetic voice, Mrs. Phillips helped wrestle the advice column from its weepy Victorian past into a hard-nosed 20th-century present.