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.