On Tuesday, Jan. 9, 1968, Ann Landers made her first appearance in The Citizen.
By then she was a household name, of course, but it still wasn't a sure thing about whether she would stay. The Citizen announced a front-page poll in that day's edition under the headline "Who is wanted? Dear Ann vs. Dear Doris" and asked readers to phone or mail in their choice between Ann and Doris Clarke, whose advice column had already been running each day in The Citizen for years.
The Citizen started running Ann that day on a trial basis.
She won the poll, of course, and she never stopped running.
Even after Esther Lederer, the voice of Ann Landers since 1955, died in 2002 at the age of 83, asking Ann for advice didn't stop. Two of Lederer's editors, Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar, took over and have been writing it for the past 14 years.
Today is their last column (it's on page 9) and with it ends the era of an advice column in The Citizen.
The Landers column and content specifically tailored by women and for women took off in the 1950s, as advertisers realized that women were wielding considerable consumer power in the household. Father may have known best but mother held the purse strings, so newspapers (and the men who ran them) began providing pages devoted to women.
Women looked after the content of these pages, paving their way into newsrooms. During the 1960s, the Women's World pages were edited by Bernice Roberts, before evolving into the Home and Family page, edited by Bev Christensen, in the 1970s.
The content was predictable for the times. There were sewing patterns and recipes, wedding announcements and features on parenting. The stories were about crafts, amateur theatre and the local Girl Guides needing leaders.
Eventually, those pages in The Citizen were called Lifestyles and remained that way until the present day. The Lifestyles pages evolved, becoming less condescendingly female-focused. Men could be interested in cooking, fashion and home decor, too, just as the news and sports sections could include stories women wanted to read and issues they wanted to understand.
The constant through that transition was Ann's daily advice.
Kathy and Marcy maintained Ann's gentle but firm words of wisdom after 2002, which alternated in tone throughout the years between Stand By Your Man and These Boots Are Made For Walkin', depending on the circumstances. It lasted so long and built such a devout base of readers because it was fearless in both its honesty and its sincerity.
For many readers, the advice was a daily dose of common sense during times when the whole world didn't make any sense at all. In a newsroom filled with opinionated reporters and editors, that common sense could be counted on to spark all sorts of debates. In other words, even the most serious newshounds made time in their morning read to see how Ann or her successors were contending with today's problems.
Sometimes there wasn't enough attention paid to the column in The Citizen's newsroom, however, leading to some memorable mistakes over the years. The phone of the managing editor would ring off the hook whenever a daytime editor would forget to put the column on the page. It happened a few too many times too close together so the solution was a rectangle added to the designated page, both electronically and printed, labelled "advice" to remind the editor working on that page to not forget about Ann.
Unfortunately, that still didn't prevent mistakes.
A former Citizen editor, now retired, who shall go unnamed, ran the same Annie's Mailbox column three consecutive days in a row. The hilarity of the error was matched only by the embarrassment of the offending editor and the rage of the managing editor.
Ann's advice on the matter would likely have been a frank and honest conversation between the two editors, likely with a counsellor present to keep the peace and find common ground.
Seriously, though, the constant for newspapers and their readers then and now has been interesting, meaningful stuff to read.
At The Citizen, all we can promise going forward is that we'll do our best each day to devote the space once made available to a lady that became everyone's wise mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and neighbour to interesting and meaningful stories about Prince George and the world at large.
