THE US: She once wrote a column about whether a lavatory roll should be hung with the free end coming over or, as she preferred, under the roll which stimulated a correspondence of 15,000 letters before she put a stop to it.
When she wrote about her own divorce after 30 years of marriage 35,000 readers responded with letters of sympathy. Most of the time, however, Eppie Lederer, better known to her millions of readers as Ann Landers, was dishing out advice about relationships, but in the same no-nonsense, down to earth way with the same practical concern for the little vicissitudes and absurdities of life.
"Buster" or "Honey", she would write, "kwitcherbellyakin' ", reflecting a boundless optimism that was her hallmark. In 1996 she famously urged her readers to "wake up and smell the coffee".
Eppie Lederer (83), died over the weekend of cancer of the bone marrow, and with her the "Ann Landers" column she took over in 1955 and which blazed a trail for the modern agony aunt column. It is currently carried in some 1,200 papers with a readership of 90 million. Her great professional rival for decades has been her twin sister, Pauline Phillips who writes as "Dear Aby" for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Born Esther Pauline Friedman, of a Russian emigre father, she later paid tribute to her Iowa upbringing and the "middle-American" values it steeped her in. "It was a place where neighbours cared about neighbours. And I mean really cared," she wrote.
Lederer, who until recently was reading up to 800 letters a day, whittled down by her staff from 2,000, started work on the Chicago Sun-Times.
Later she moved to her final home in the Chicago Tribune where she acquired a reputation for liberal views on issues from homosexuality to abortion to gun control winning enemies in the National Rifle Association, the pro-life movement, and the animal rights movement over her support for animal experimentation.
