Dear Miss Dix

Of all the thousands of troubled women who have turned hopefully to Dorothy Dix, none ever found a happier solution than the first. She was Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, sheltered daughter of a genteel but impoverished Tennessee family, and her problem was how to make a living. At 25, with an ailing husband to support, tiny Mrs. Gilmer was a women's-page slavey on the New Orleans Picayune, where she had started at $5 a week.

Timidly, she went to her managing editor one day in 1896 with a bright idea: a column of advice for any reader with a worry. Asked bluff, bay-windowed Major Nathaniel Burbank: "And how do you want to sign it?"

The name she took became the most famous byline of any newspaperwoman's. Last week, when "Dorothy Dix" turned 50, her creator was a lively 75. Both were still going strong, Miss Dix as an oracle in 216 papers, Mrs. Gilmer as a grande dame of New Orleans with an annual income of more than $75,000. Her column held a record for longevity, beating out the Katzenjammer Kids by a year and Beatrice Fairfax by two.

Ax Murders to Heart Mends. Elizabeth Gilmer got her biggest break in 1901, when William Randolph Hearst lured her to Manhattan. She carried a wad of "get-home money" in her stocking, for her first six weeks in the big city. But she stayed, to become the greatest sob sister of her day. From the Harry K. Thaw trial to the Hall-Mills case, no big murder was complete without her. In 1920 she tired of it, told her city editor that if she ever covered another murder it would be his, and flounced off to New Orleans to concentrate on heart-mending.

Today she still gets 1,000 letters a week. Her postwar mail is loaded with missives from faithless war wives, bewildered veterans, bobby-soxers who want to know how to grow up. Everybody gets an answer; in the case of suicidal correspondents it goes by airmail. Often it is the same answer ("Men are a selfish lot," etc.) that worked half a century ago. But the questions have changed, from "Should I help a gentleman on with his coat?" to "Is it all right for me to spend a weekend in Atlanta with a boy friend?"

Her advice is sympathetic, but not syrupy. Recently a girl wrote her: "I went out with a young man of whom I'm very fond . . . I found it necessary to take several cocktails in order not to appear unsophisticated, although I am not given to drink. Did I do wrong?" Replied Dorothy Dix: "Quite probably."

Respectable Woman. To keep abreast of the woeful tide, Mrs. Gilmer is up at 7 a.m. With a stenographer and her companion-secretary, she zips through her daily grist with a sharp eye out for the "angle" that will cue a sermonette. Every afternoon her chauffeur drives her through Audubon Park and back to the swank Prytania Street apartment. Her stock wisecrack, when showing guests her fine Louis XIV bed: "I'll bet I'm the only respectable woman who ever slept in it!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.