“Wake up and smell the coffee!”
Those famous words of advice were immortalized by the celebrated Chicago
Tribune‘s advice columnist Ann Landers, who died Saturday at her
Chicago home of multiple myeloma, a malignant tumor of the bone marrow,
Reuters reports. She was 83.
Undisputedly one of the world’s most widely read columnists for the past 40
years, her column was also one of the most widely syndicated, appearing in
over 1,200 newspapers and reaching over 90 million readers.
Ann Landers’ real name was Esther “Eppie” Pauline Friedman Lederer. In 1955,
Lederer took over the Ann Landers column in the Chicago’s Sun-Times
newspaper, which was then moved over to the Chicago Tribune syndicate
in 1987.
During her reign, she reinvented the newspaper advice column by combining sage guidance on a wide range of topics with a wicked sense of humor. She was also tirelessly devoted to
her readers, sometimes spending 14 hours a day reading the thousands of
letters that poured in.
Through her career, Lederer only had one major competitor–her twin sister
Pauline Phillips, aka Abigail Van Buren, or “Dear Abby.” The two were long
rumored to be at odds, but they were on good terms in recent years, Reuters
reports.
Lederer became the first journalist to win the Albert Lasker Public Service
Award for her work with Congress to raise millions of dollars for cancer
research and was appointed in 1980 to a six-year term on the board of the
National Cancer Institute.
