From Iowa -- The Most Widely Known Twins in the History of the World

Here they are at age 12

The Iowa twins who would become known worldwide, February 1, 1930. Additional information, including credit, at bottom of this Newsletter.

These were the most widely known twin sisters in history during their heyday.

They are pictured here, more than 95 years ago, at age 12 in a photo from their local newspaper in their Iowa hometown — when only the residents of their hometown knew who they were.

The photo was buried deep inside a Saturday edition of that newspaper and was discovered by accident. That might have been because the names by which the twins were known at that time bear no resemblance to the names by which they became famous. The photo would not have been easily discovered by a conventional digital search today.

Here are a few other oddities and curiosities about these twins.

They both had the same given names, both first and middle, sort of, but neither of them went by either their given first or middle names as adults. All through their childhood and teenage years, they did everything together. They dressed alike, wore their hair alike, and sometimes slept in the same bed.

As youngsters, they performed together for audiences – singing, dancing, and playing their violins. The photo above was made in connection with a song and dance performance scheduled for the next day in their hometown. The caption described the girls as clever performers.

When they started dating, they would go to parties escorted by a single young man, one of them on the young man’s left side, the other on his right.

They went to college together and wore matching raccoon coats in the winter. They left college after three years to get married in a double wedding two days before their 21^st birthday with more than 700 guests in attendance. Of course, they had matching bridal gowns, veils, and hairdos.

So who are they? Some of you, no doubt, have figured it out by now, but you might want to read on as this newsletter digs into some of the lesser-known details about their fascinating lives. The rest of you will have to keep reading and play out the guessing game.

The men they would marry

Ed Judel Phillips and his family immigrated to America from Minsk, Belarus, Russia in 1900 and settled in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where he set up a business selling tobacco, newspapers, and candy.

The family moved to Minneapolis in 1930. Three years later with the end of Prohibition, the business, Ed Phillips & Sons, switched to producing vodka, gin, whiskey, and other alcoholic beverages. Within a little more than a decade, the company would become the largest manufacturer and distributor of spirits in the U.S. Eventually, the company would expand and diversify to include a household appliance manufacturing business based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, as well as a regional passenger airline carrier serving the upper Midwest.

Ed’s grandson, Morton Phillips, attended the University of Minnesota, where he met a young woman at a fraternity party. They would spend the rest of their lives together. The young woman, by the way, had a twin sister, who also became engaged to be married around the same time. The twins’ engagements were announced in their hometown newspaper in March 1939; the marriage was set for July.

The twins were shopping for bridal veils a short time later in a department store in their hometown. A young man who was selling hats in that store was about to meet his future wife — even though she already was engaged to someone else (not Morton Phillips). Before long, this twin dropped the guy she was engaged to and quickly replaced him with hat salesman Jules Lederer. The twins’ double wedding proceeded, except with a small change in cast members.

Jules’s father, Morris Lederer, had immigrated to Detroit from Austria. Morris died in 1930, when Jules was 13. The boy went to work in sales — he was a natural at it — to help support his mother and 12 siblings. Somehow, in 1939, he found himself selling hats in a department store in Iowa.

A few years later, the brothers-in-law Morton Phillips and Jules Lederer were drafted into World War II; they served in the same unit.

After the war, both families relocated to Eau Claire, where Morton Phillips found a job for his brother-in-law, Jules Lederer, in the family’s appliance manufacturing company. The company’s main product, the Presto Pressure Cooker, had been unveiled to rave reviews nationally at the New York World’s Fair a few months before the twins’ wedding.

But there, in Eau Claire, the bond that had held tight for the twin girls since birth began to crack. Morton Phillips and his wife had a lot of money. Jules Lederer and his wife didn’t. Eventually, the Lederers moved to Chicago, where, in 1959, Jules joined with a distant relative from Los Angeles who had started a small car rental company. The following year the men jointly founded the Budget Car Rental company in Chicago, and Jules, too, was on his way to substantial wealth.

Meet the twins

And now it is time to tell the stories of twin sisters; the Friedman Twins, to be more precise.

Their father, Abe Friedman, a Russian Jew, immigrated with his parents and siblings to Sioux City, Iowa, in about 1908. He married within a year or two and worked first in the grocery business, then sold real estate, and finally became a theater manager. He and his wife, Rebecca, had four daughters, the final two arriving within 17 minutes of each other on the Fourth of July in 1918.

The birth names of the twin girls were Esther Pauline Friedman and Pauline Esther Friedman. Perhaps that became a bit confusing, and perhaps it was why both girls ended up with unusual but very different nicknames. Esther Pauline became Eppie. Pauline Esther became Popo.

They would become known worldwide for their writing as:

Ann Landers (Eppie), and . . .

Abigail VanBuren (Popo).

Their first experience writing a newspaper column was in the late 1930s as students at Morningside College in Sioux City. Together, they co-authored a gossip column, “The Rat,” in the student newspaper under the byline “PE-EP,” the initials of Pauline Esther - Esther Pauline.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the twins’ column had an element of splash. From one of their columns, as reported in the Sioux City Journal in 1994:

“One bright soph. [sophomore] went so far as to threaten to spank us in chapel if his name appeared once more in this space. Okay, Mr. Worsley. . . Choose your weapon at six paces. . . See ya’ in chapel!”

That appears to have been the extent of their published writing for the next couple of decades.

Then in Chicago in 1955, Eppie applied for an opening at the Chicago Sun-Times, where the author of an advice column, writing under the pseudonym Ann Landers, had died. The editors held a contest seeking a replacement author for the Ann Landers column. Eppie blew the competition away by seeking advice from experts for the sample columns she submitted. Eppie Lederer became Ann Landers but would continue to be generally known as Eppie.

Her column immediately drew so much reader response that she asked her sister, by then living with her family in Northern California, to help by reading some of the letters and suggesting responses. The Sun-Times, however, did not like the arrangement; they had hired one columnist, not two. Popo was out. But she was not through. What Eppie was doing must have looked like it was both fun and rewarding.

Moreover, Popo would strike many readers as a more clever writer than her sister. Years later, for example, when both twins were writing competing advice columns, a young woman wrote to Popo — by then known as Dear Abby — to say she wanted to give her boyfriend something nice for his birthday and asked, “What do you think he would like?” Abby ripped off one of her classic one-liners:

“Never mind what he’d like, give him a tie.”

Within a year after Eppie became Ann Landers in Chicago, Popo applied at the San Francisco Chronicle where she deemed the sitting advice columnist not up to her standards. The editor, possibly trying to get rid of Popo, suggested that she take some of the columns home and try writing the responses herself. She came back later the same day, rewritten columns in hand, and, yes, she used the same approach Eppie had used in Chicago, getting input from experts. She also already had a pseudonym in mind for the name she would use on the column. Welcome to the world of advice columnists, Abigail Van Buren; the surname taken from America’s eighth president, who fought slavery and created the two-party system; the given name from a biblical reference in Judaism, a woman who used her intelligence to save her family from harm after her husband insulted the future King David.

It would not be long before a full-blown feud erupted between the twins, apparently rooted in money. Abby’s entry into the advice column business set up an obvious rivalry between the twins over syndication – a system in which a columnist’s work is sold to many other newspapers with the author and the syndication company both profiting nicely. Eppie’s advice column already was in syndication to a handful of newspapers. Then, when Abby jumped into the syndication game the competition between them was in full swing. As time passed, several million dollars each year would have been at play in syndication fees for the two columns.

The seeds for tension in the relationship between Abby and Eppie, however, appear to have been quietly sown years earlier.

In 1958, Abby recalled in an article in Life magazine that Eppie “wanted to be first violin in the school orchestra, but I was.” The recollection was one of several slams by one sister against the other in the Life article, which was reprinted in part in January 2022, in an article by Dean Robbins in Wisconsin Life magazine.

“She’s just like a kid who beats a dog until somebody looks, and then starts petting it,” Eppie said of Abby, in the same article.

And in Eau Claire, where the sisters had lived for more than a decade, Abby and her wealthy husband lived in a stately two-story home, while Eppie and husband lived in a small two-bedroom home that Abby dubbed “Peanut Place,” Wisconsin Life reported.

The twins reconciled in the mid-1960s for a few years, but by the late 1970s, they were at it again — Eppie saying publicly that she never read Abby’s column, and a couple of years later, Abby describing Eppie as envious and inferior.

Until Abby and Eppie entered the advice column business, such columns usually failed to address either major issues of the times or personal relationships. In fact, they were somewhat boring. Still, in a world in which there was no social media and no cell phones, newspapers and magazines were the major outlets for advice columns, such as they were.

The world’s first advice column

The concept of an advice column appears to have originated in London in the 1690s, when John Dutton, a bookseller, created a single-sheet twice-weekly newspaper called The Athenian Mercury specifically to receive questions from readers and provide answers in the newspaper from a panel of experts he had selected. When a question came in seeking information or advice about a subject that was beyond the panel’s expertise, Dutton created a fictitious expert, according to an article by W. Clark Hendley in the Journal of Popular Culture in September 1977.

Questions about personal relationships – the bread and butter of the Ann Landers and Dear Abby columns beginning in the mid-1950s – were not common, however, during this earlier era. The Mercury did get a question once from a man about the propriety of premarital sex with a woman to whom he was engaged. Unfortunately, the 1977 article did not report The Mercury’s response.

The Mercury died after about a decade. Other newspapers did pick up the idea, but the kind of openness and frankness on which Abby and Eppie thrived continued to be the exception – until the twins transformed the advice column format.

A more common kind of question for the Mercury was something like this: What language would a child speak if it had not had contact with humans for the first 12 years of its life? The obvious answer: None. No people around, no language.

Ultimately, the Friedman twins’ groundbreaking columns would appear in more than two thousand newspapers worldwide that collectively had 200 million readers – 110 million for Abby, 90 million for Eppie.

Eppie died in Chicago of cancer in 2002. Abby died in Los Angeles of Alzheimer’s disease in 2013. Their daughters, Margo Lederer Howard, and Jeanne Phillips, each took over their mothers’ columns for a time

But after Abby’s death, Eppie’s daughter, Margo, told The New York Times that “the rivalry went into the next generation” as well, marring the relationship between the two cousins as it had between the twins themselves.

Photo at top: The Friedman twins, Pauline Esther and Esther Pauline, promoting their appearance on Sunday, February 2, 1930, at a cabaret dinner dance at Shaare Zion Synagogue in Sioux City, Iowa. Photo from Sioux City Journal.

Sources for this Newsletter include but are not limited to: Dear Abby, Ask Ann Landers and Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Life, Dean Robbins, January 13, 2022; The Rivalry of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, Book Riot, Melissa Baron, April 8, 1922; Birth of advice-givers Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, Jewish Women’s Archive, jwa.org; Good Advice, Sioux City Journal, July 31, 1994; Pauline Phillips, 10 Bet-You-Didn’t-Know Facts About Dear Abby, Patgrick Kriger, January 17, 2013, blog.aarp.org/legacy/pauline-phillips; Advice Column, W. Clark Hendley, Journal of Popular Culture, September 1977; Abigail Van Buren obituary, Samantha Shapiro, The New York Times, December 21, 2013, archive.nytimes.com; Jules Lederer, wikipedia.org; Ask Ann Landers, wikipedia.org; Corporate history of Budget Car Rental, www.budget.com; National Presto Industries, wikipedia.org; Phillips Distilling Company, wikipedia.org; Presto Company History, www.gopresto.com; 150 Icons of Siouxland, Bruce Miller and Lynn Zerschlng; Sioux City Journal, September 6, 2014.

NOTE TO READERS: I write this newsletter, Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. You can subscribe for free. However, this newsletter requires substantial time for research. If you enjoy reading it, please consider showing your support by becoming a paid subscriber at the level that feels right for you. Click on the “Subscribe now” button here. Pricing begins at less than $2 per newsletter.

Iowa Writers Collaborative Roundup

Linking readers and professional writers who care about Iowa.

By Julie Gammack

The Iowa Writers Collaborative is made up of some of the foremost regional journalists in the country. Each writer is independent and has a Substack of their own.