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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. . . ."
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