Esther Pauline “Eppie” Friedman Lederer (Ann Landers)

Before Chicago fame she spent roughly a decade of adult life in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as a Presto company wife who chaired the county Democrats and worked against Joe McCarthy.

She was born July 4, 1918, in Sioux City, Iowa, seventeen minutes ahead of her identical twin Pauline (“Popo,” later Dear Abby). The sisters married in a double wedding in identical dresses in 1938. After World War II both husbands worked at National Presto in Eau Claire; the twins lived about a mile apart, led parades in a Cadillac convertible, watched the Eau Claire Bears at Carson Park, volunteered for the Red Cross, and threw costume parties that local editor Marshall Atkinson later remembered as “the ten years of twins.” Pauline’s house was the bigger one. Eppie chaired the Eau Claire County Democratic Party. They left in the mid-1950s.

In Chicago she won the Sun-Times contest to replace the original Ann Landers, Ruth Crowley, by sending sample copy that quoted experts, including a Supreme Court justice. Three months later her twin launched Dear Abby in San Francisco. The sisters stopped speaking. American advice culture was born, in part, in a Presto company town. She died in 2002. The Eau Claire claim is the adult stretch, not a birthplace.