"Dear Nancy"

Dear Nancy: For the first time in my life (I'm 19 years old) I can't go to my mother. I wouldn't tell her what I am going to tell yon for anything. . . . Until New Year's Eve, Nancy, I was a happy girl. . . .

DISGRACED

Dear Nancy Brown: So much has happened since I last wrote you. I think it was when my baby boy had died and my Golden Girl was bitter over the expected arrival of another. Well, I'm all alone now. . . . JUST A MAN

Dear Nancy: I'm one of those girls who slipped, and oh, how sorry I am. . . . Please, Nancy, tell me that I still have a chance. . . .

SORRY

Dear Nancy: I joined a nudist colony near Paris. . . . While there, a scholarly, paunchy old gentleman clad only in a pince-nez, read Hudson's Green Mansions to me. . . .

MARY

Dear Nancy: I have a serious problem facing me and I wonder if you can help me settle it. I am to be married next week, and my fiancee's mother insists that we take her younger daughter with us on our honeymoon. . . .

UNHAPPY H. H.

Dear Nancy: Here I am coming again like an abanded cat. . . .

A SAD OLD MAN

Dear Nancy: I'm a 20-year-old coed. .. . He's 24, fine looking and a perfect gentleman to all appearances. . . . He has been telling me that nine out of every ten girls permit undue familiarities from their men friends. . . . I told him he had only come across isolated cases and nine-tenths of the women were straight shooters. Now, Nancy, who is right? . . .

A WORKING CO-ED

No ordinary Miss Lonelyhearts is the Nancy Brown to whom these and hundreds of similar heartbleats were trustfully addressed, appearing first in her Experience Column in the Detroit News and last week in a book called Nancy's Family.* But not even her employers fully appreciated her power until she gave a party for her readers at Detroit's Art Institute five years ago. With Nancy Brown, Editor William S. Gilmore of the News set out to the party in his automobile, found streets for blocks around the Institute tightly packed with people. Summoning a traffic policeman, Mr. Gilmore inquired the reason. "Hell, where you been?" cried the policeman. "Mean to say you ain't heard of Nancy Brown's party?"

That tale is now a Detroit legend. Police estimated the crowd at 100,000, and Nancy Brown began to rival Edgar A. Guest of the Detroit Free Press as the city's top literary figure. When she announced a religious Sunrise Service for her Column Family on Belle Isle last year, some 30,000 Detroiters crawled out of bed to attend. For a similar service this year attendance jumped, in Editor Gilmore's reckoning, by "two and a half acres" of people. When that alert local preacher named Edgar DeWitt Jones volunteered as Column Chaplain and invited Column Folks to visit his church in alphabetical sections, the church overflowed on four successive Sundays. Some 10,000 readers turned out when Nancy Brown's Column presented the Art Institute with a painting called Street in Brooklyn last year. Column Folks have also contributed to the Detroit Old Newsboys' Charitable Goodfellow Fund, sponsored six Detroit Symphony concerts, helped to reforest northern Michigan, to build a "beerless beer garden" for youngsters.

Meantime all Detroit has asked, "Who is Nancy Brown?" Years ago the News's editors concluded that the best way to build up their columnist as a circulation-puller was to make a mystery of her identity. They have continued to whet Detroit's curiosity by creating around Nancy Brown's real name as titillating a hocus-pocus as that which made the reputations of The Man in the Iron Mask and radio's Your Lover. At her parties and religious services she mingles anonymously with the crowd. Only a few of her Column Folks have guessed her out.

"Nancy Brown" was born Annie Louise Brown in Perry, Me. 65 years ago this week. She was graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1892, taught school in White River Junction, Vt., Rockville, Conn. and Mount Clemens, Mich. In 1904 she married James Edward Leslie, Pittsburgh dramatic critic. After her husband's death in 1917 childless Widow Leslie filled in for a few months as dramatic editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, then went to live with relatives in Michigan. Late in 1918 she appeared at the office of the Detroit News, asked for a job.

The News's editor, who had just been studying a column for housewives in the Kansas City Star, asked Mrs. Leslie to develop something similar, assigned her to his women's department. Eight months later, on April 19, 1919, her column appeared as an unsigned weekly feature. Her chatty advice on domestic problems caught on at once. Within three months the column, signed "Nancy Brown," was appearing every day. Widow Leslie tried to play down sex problems, but they soon bulked too large to ignore. A physician, a lawyer and a sociologist were hired as her consultants. Her column became famed for the authoritative manner and homey style in which she discussed life, death, morals, art, literature, music, business, religion, education, love.

Widow Leslie has long written a daily editorial for the News under her own name, and many a hoaxed reader sends Columnist Nancy Brown messages and gifts to hand to Editorial Writer Leslie. At 65 she is a small, plump person, shy, softspoken, white-haired. She belongs to the Unitarian Church, lives at No. 1224 Glynn Court, Detroit.

Given the God-like job of managing numerous other people's private lives, many an adviser-to-the-lovelorn tends in time to confuse herself with deity. Nancy Brown's advice remains gentle, firm, grandmotherly, sprinkled with "my dears" "dear girls," "dear women." Since the growth of her enormous local reputation, however, observers have noted that much of Nancy Brown's column is given over to letters praising the wisdom and generosity of Nancy Brown. Some of her onetime assistants say that most of her sweetness & light is saved for her column. When the Column Family presented a portrait of Longfellow to the Art Institute last month, the News estimated attendance at 10,000. Observers less concerned with Nancy Brown as a circulation builder set the figure closer to 2,000. Not all of Nancy Brown's correspondents are heartsick or sex-ridden. In the introduction to Nancy's Family, fourth of her collections of letters and advice to appear in book form, Mrs. James E. Leslie wrote: "Among the outstanding discussions of the year (1933-34) were: what prompted 70,000 people to attend the service on Belle Isle at dawn; ways and means of promoting world peace; the difficulties of the dateless girl; book discussions; homesteading in the north; the problems of bewildered young people who have just finished school and cannot find work; and last and liveliest of all, sex problems of modern youth, prompted by a letter written by two girls who signed themselves 'Fallen Leaves.' They asked if they were 'bad' because they had followed 'Mother Nature's urge!' !:

To "A Working Coed" worried about "undue familiarities," Widow Leslie wrote : "There is no question about who is right, my dear. You really know the answer, don't you? You know that being moral and living cleanly and honorably is not mere idealism, don't you? ... I am sure if you could read the letters that come to me from girls who are paying the price of illegitimate motherhood because they believed in the smooth tongues of their boy friends, you would never take any such chances for yourself. . . ."

*The Detroit News. Cost: $1.03 if called for, $1.18 if mailed, $1.50 if mailed to foreign country.

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