title: Dear Mrs. Griggs. Women Readers Pour Out Their Hearts From The Heartland (Diederich Studies in Media and Communication)
author:  Genevieve G. McBride 
description: Before Dear Abby or Ann Landers, an advice columnist beloved as Dear Mrs. Griggs already had dispensed wisdom to millions of readers for decades. Indeed, the iconic Ione Quinby Griggs became legendary for her longevity of more than half a century in the advice industry, because she colluded with her column's readers by empowering them to set the agenda of their page, the back page of the newspaper. Their letters often foreshadowed front-page news as well as modern social media in the collaboration that created a forerunner in their more sociable media. A form of community forum, the column provides a literal mother lode for research into her readers' letters on their daily lives and everyday concerns, in their own and often colorful words. The result is a unique social history of a region, a class, and a gender rarely represented in histories: Generations of Midwestern women in a working-class city, as well as surrounding rural areas that soon became suburbs, where daily reading of Dear Mrs. Griggs became one of the continuities in their lives, amid major societal conflicts and controversies in the mid-twentieth century.If they rarely made news on the front page, readers of Dear Mrs. Griggs made their back page the best-read page of the Milwaukee Journal for decades. From the Depression's depths in the 1930s into new workplaces for women on the wartime homefront in the 1940s, from urban ethnic enclaves to homes of their ownand spiked kaffeeklatschesin new postwar suburbs in the 1950s, from the modern women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s into the conservative revolution of the 1980s, her faithful readers across the Heartland penned often-heartfelt and sometimes hilarious letters on their issues in their times.And if, at times, some letters seemed to be hoaxes, the bane of newspapering, her readers today again may agree with Dear Mrs. Griggs and her millions of readers then on their reasons to turn daily for decades to their back page of the newspaper. All letters could be revealing of her readers' lives, as the columnist knew. However, she had another reason, revealing of her own wisdom and wit in replies to readers that contributed to their column's remarkable run. Queried on running one questionable letter, Ione Quinby Griggs replied: What's the harm in having a little fun?
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  # Eyeful
  
  
  A Gladiators of the Gridiron Romance
  
  
  C.R. Grissom
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![Tule Publishing Logo](../images/00001.jpeg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Eyeful
  
  
  Copyright © 2021 C.R. Grissom
  
  
  Kindle Edition
  
  
  The Tule Publishing, Inc.
  
  
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
  
  
  First Publication by Tule Publishing 2021
  
  
  Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill
  
  
  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
  without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
  critical articles and reviews.
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are
  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
  to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is
  entirely coincidental.
  
  
  ISBN: 978-1-953647-04-7
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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