NEW YORK — Two men had recently bought a house together in the tiny San Francisco neighborhood of Nob Hill, and the neighbors were annoyed. The men were entertaining “a very suspicious mixture of company,” the neighbors wrote into their paper’s advice column, asking, “How can we improve the neighborhood?”
“You could move,” Dear Abby replied.
That zinger was such classic Abby — real name, Pauline Friedman Phillips — that it moved her daughter to burst into laughter Thursday when reminded of it, even though she had just returned from the funeral of her mother, who died a day earlier at age 94 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
“People weren’t really talking about homosexuality back then,” Jeanne Phillips, who now writes the famous syndicated column, said. “But you know, there wasn’t a subject my mother wouldn’t take on.”
As the world said goodbye to Dear Abby on Thursday, the Web was full of her snappiest one-liners, responses to thousands of letters over the decades that she wrote in her daily column. But her admirers noted that behind the humor and wit was a huge heart, and a genuine desire to improve people’s lives.