Doris Willens (August 15, 1924 – July 15, 2021) was an American singer-songwriter, journalist, advertising executive and author. She was a member of the Baby Sitters children's folk music group along with Alan Arkin and Lee Hays, and she wrote Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays (1988), describing his career with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers. Willens worked for the New York Journal-American as a columnist covering Madison Avenue advertising agencies. For nearly two decades she ran public relations for ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, ending as vice president. Later, she punctured the reputation of William Bernbach by writing about him from an insider's perspective. She wrote a handful of musicals and plays including Piano Bar in 1978. Creating a theatrical group for seniors – Primrose Productions – Willens co-produced musicals in Long Island, New York, in the 1990s and 2000s. Her older brother was wealthy political donor and Nuclear Freeze activist Harold Willens (1914–2003). Early life Willens' Jewish family came from the northern Chernigov region of Ukraine. Her mother was born Badana Heskin in 1895, and she married Samuel Wilensky (or Wolensky). Because of rising antisemitic violence, her father and his younger brother Ben traveled to the United States in July 1914 just as World War I was starting. The two men settled in The Bronx supported by the lantzman community. Back in Chernigov, her mother raised a son, Harold. Mother and son barely escaped death in the Kiev pogroms (1919), and in 1922 they paid a smuggler "mule" who was guiding a group of Jews out of Europe. The family reunited in The Bronx, where Doris was born in 1924. At the urging of her mother's brother to join him, the family moved to Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, in 1927. Her mother, known as "Bobbie", was a garment worker, and her father was a business agent for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Willens attended Manual Arts High School, then entered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to get a bachelor's degree in English. She was the chief editor of the Daily Bruin in 1944–1945 during her senior year, and her boyfriend, another English major, was future broadcaster Bill Stout. Willens returned to New York to enroll in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, earning a scholarship in 1946 from the Woman's Press Club of New York City. Journalism and advertising Willens was a