Thanks Abby!

Portions of this article come from the Los Angeles Times.

Pauline Friedman Phillips dies at 94; original 'Dear Abby'

Phillips, writing as Abigail Van Buren, dispensed wry, no-nonsense advice to newspaper readers around the world for over 40 years. Her identical twin also wrote an advice column, as Ann Landers.

"Dear Abby" is the world's most widely syndicated column, appearing in more than 1,400 newspapers and generating as many as 10,000 letters a week, according to the syndicate.

Dear Abby: "Are birth control pills deductible?"

"Only if they don't work," she answered.

From 1939 until her death, she was married to Morton B. Phillips, scion of the National Pressure Cooker Co. From an office in their Beverly Hills home, she edited the column into her 80s. She started sharing a byline with her daughter, Jeanne Phillips, in 2000 and turned the column over to her two years later.

The improbable saga of "Dear Abby" began in 1955 when Phillips was an affluent homemaker in Hillsborough, Calif., with time on her hands, doing volunteer work and playing mah-jongg. Her twin, who'd just been hired by the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate to take over the Ann Landers column, began soliciting her help with replies.

Extremely close, the sisters were thrilled to be collaborating, but the arrangement abruptly ended when the syndicate that distributed the Ann Landers column learned of it.

"Having acquired a taste for dispensing advice," as Phillips wrote in her 1981 book, "The Best of Dear Abby," she offered to write a column for the San Mateo Times, but it declined.

When she called the San Francisco Chronicle, she identified herself to feature editor Stanleigh Arnold as a Hillsborough housewife and said she could write a better column than the one the paper published. Intrigued by her brashness, he invited her to stop by sometime.