Who is Ann Landers?
To start, the woman whose death occasions these obituaries is not really named Ann Landers. Nor was she the first writer to give advice under the pen name of ‘Ann Landers’. ‘Ann Landers’ has now died twice. The first advice columnist to write under the pen name of ‘Ann Landers’ was a nurse named Ruth Crowley. This woman died in 1955. This second Ann Landers whose death we mark today was originally born as Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer. http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/Landers.html Esther Pauline Friedman-Lederer So let’s begin with the obituary for the real person. It’s already largely written here by US-Israel.org. “Her parents, Abraham and Rebecca Friedman, were Russian Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1908. They moved to Sioux City, Iowa, in 1910, where two daughters, Helen and Dorothy, were born. Like many Russian Jewish immigrants of that time, the family slowly earned enough money to leave the poorer section of the city, first by peddling chickens
