Dear Abby

Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips (born July 4, 1918) started writing the Dear Abby syndicated personal advice column in 1956 under the pen name, Abigail Van Buren. Since her retirement in 2002 after an onset of Alzheimer's disease, her daughter, Jeanne Phillips, has been writing the column under the same pen name.

According to Pauline, she had come up with the pen name, Abigail Van Buren, by combining the name of the biblical character, Abigail, in the Book of Samuel with the last name of former U.S. President Martin Van Buren.

According to its publishers, the column is known for its "uncommon common sense and youthful perspective", and is read by more people than any other newspaper column worldwide.

Biography

Pauline was an identical twin: Her sister, Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer, was 17 minutes older than Pauline, and also wrote the internationally syndicated "Ann Landers" personal advice column.

The daughters of Russian Jewish immigrants, the twins grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, and went by the nicknames "Popo" and "Eppie", respectively. They attended Central High School(aka "The Castle on the Hill") in Sioux City, Iowa, and then went on to study at Morningside College. They were very close and had a joint wedding ceremony in 1939 at the age of 21.

As competing columnists, however, the two sisters did not have a happy relationship. They publicly reconciled during 1964, although some suggest that the acrimony endured. Just a few years before Eppie's death in 2002, they were not on speaking terms. It is said that they reconciled before Eppie's death, though the reconciliation is somewhat questionable, considering that Pauline had started suffering from Alzheimer's disease that same year.

Also see: Esther "Eppie" Pauline Friedman Lederer

Levi Strauss

Levi Strauss, born Löb Strauß (February 26, 1829 - September 26, 1902) was the German-born American creator of the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His namesake firm, Levi Strauss & Company, was founded in 1853 in San Francisco.
Background

Levi Strauss was born on February 26,1829 to Hirsch Strauss and Rebecca Haas Strauss, both Jewish. He was born in Buttenheim in Bavaria, Germany. Young Levi sailed from Bremerhaven to New York where his two older brothers, Jonas and Louis, had already established a successful wholesale textile and tailoring business. After a stay of two days in New York, he continued on to the ranch of his uncle, Daniel Goldman in Louisville, Kentucky. There he spent the next five years learning the language and the ways of his new homeland in order that he might someday take over his uncle's ranch. But Levi had dreams of becoming an independent businessman, and for several years he walked the roads of Kentucky, selling cloth and notions from the pack on his back.

In 1847, Strauss, his mother and two sisters moved to New York City to join his brothers Jonas and Louis Löb in their dry goods business. By 1850 he had adopted the name "Levi Strauss".

In 1853, Strauss became an American citizen and moved to bustling San Francisco, California, where the California Gold Rush was still in high gear. Levi expected that the mining camps would welcome his buttons, scissors, thread and bolts of fabric; additionally, he had yards of canvas sailcloth intended for tent-making and as covers for the Conestoga wagons that dotted the landscape next to every stream and river in the area.

Strauss and his brother-in-law David Stern opened a dry goods wholesale business called Levi Strauss & Co. Levi, estimated at about 5' 11" and 185 pounds, was often found leading a pack-horse, heavily laden with merchandise, directly into the mining camps found throughout the region. The story goes that both prospectors and miners, often complaining about the easily torn cotton "britches" and pockets that "split right out" gave Levi the idea to make a rugged overall trouser for the miners to wear. These were fashioned from bolts of brown canvas sailcloth, with gold ore storage pockets that were nearly impossible to split. Levi exhausted his original supply of canvas as the demand grew for his hard-wearing overalls, and so he switched to a sturdy fabric called serge, made in Nimes, France by the Andre family. Originally called serge de Nimes, the name was soon shortened to denim.

Business

In 1872, Levi received a letter from Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada tailor. Jacob W. Davis (born as Jacob Youphes) was a Jewish tailor from Latvia. Davis was one of Levi Strauss' regular customers, who purchased bolts of cloth from the company to use for his own business. In this letter, Davis told Levi about the interesting way in which he made pants for his customers: he placed metal rivets at the points of strain—pocket corners and on the base of the fly. As he did not have the money to patent his process he suggested that Levi pay for the paperwork and that they take out the patent together.

On May 20, 1873, Strauss and Davis received United States patent #139121 for using copper rivets to strengthen the pockets of denim work pants. Levi Strauss & Co. began manufacturing the first of the famous Levi's brand of jeans in San Francisco, using fabric from the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Levi Strauss died on September 26, 1902 and was buried in Colma. He left his thriving manufacturing and dry goods business to his four nephews—Jacob, Louis, Abraham and Sigmund Stern—who helped rebuild the company after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The following year, Jacob Davis sold back his share of the company.

Ann Frank

Anne Frank / Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12, 1929 – beginning of March, 1945) was a European Jewish girl (born in Germany, stateless since 1941, but she claimed to be Dutch as she grew up in the Netherlands) who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family and four friends in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. As persecutions against the Jewish population increased, the family went into hiding in July 1942 in hidden rooms in her father Otto Frank's office building. After two years in hiding the group was betrayed and transported to concentration camps. Seven months after her arrest, Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp within days of her sister, Margot Frank. Her father, Otto, the only survivor of the group, returned to Amsterdam after the war ended, to find that her diary had been saved. He had it published in Dutch under the title Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven van 12 Juni 1942 – 1 Augustus 1944 (The Backhouse: Diary notes from 12 June 1942 – 1 August 1944).

The diary, which was given to Anne Frank on her thirteenth birthday, chronicles her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. It was published as The Diary of a Young Girl and eventually translated from its original Dutch into many languages and became one of the world's most widely read books. There have also been several films, television, theatrical productions, and even an opera based on the diary. Described as the work of a mature and insightful mind, it provides an intimate examination of daily life under Nazi occupation and in hiding; through her writing, Anne Frank has become one of the most renowned and discussed of Holocaust victims.