Way before 'Dear Abby' and 'Ann Landers,' this North Jersey native was dishing out advice
Ambling through life? Ailing in relationships? Marion Clyde McCarroll had answers.
A well-rounded reporter who would twice serve as the president of the Newswomen's Club of New York, McCarroll spent more than two decades as a nationally syndicated advice columnist.
She deftly helped people manage trivial and life-altering scenarios. She could tell you what to wear to a wedding or how the bride and groom should react to an objection at the altar with equal aplomb.
All of it was done from behind a curtain, under the pen name Beatrice Fairfax.
She was the second Beatrice Fairfax, to be precise. The originator of America's original advisor to the lovelorn was Marie Manning. Manning created the column in July 1898 as a journalist at William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal in response to letters to the editor from readers seeking answers to ease their apprehensions. After helping popularize the advice column in the early 1900s, Manning married Michael Gasch and quit in 1905. She returned after the stock market crash of 1929 and would write the column until her death in November 1945.
By then, McCarroll had been working for four years under Hearst as the women's page editor for the Hearst-owned King Features Syndicates. After Manning died, McCarroll assumed the Fairfax role. McCarroll carried the column well beyond the post-war years. Until her 1966 retirement, she catered to a national audience, providing readers with everything from guidance on obtaining social services to her tenets of teen dating.
Throughout its nearly 70-year run, the Fairfax column evolved in tone, says David Gudelunas, a professor and dean at the University of Tampa who wrote a 2008 book on advice columns. There was a dramatic shift in what was acceptable conversation in print journalism over the span of the column, he says. Still, the audience was consistent, as was the subject matter. Unbiased advice on relationship issues remained the column's bread and butter.
"The Fairfax column remained very popular and evolved with the genre," Gudelunas says. "Love and relationships were always central to the column."
Through her two decades as Fairfax, McCarroll capitalized on stories that unsettled. She extended discussions across multiple weeks by allowing readers to send letters of counsel to a particularly forlorn advice-seeker.
McCarroll most often responded to lonely adults and unsure teenagers lacking community and familial guidance. Sometimes, she set plain terms. Occasionally, she demanded the end of a relationship. Often, she responded with questions akin to imperatives:
"If you really want to know what she thinks of you, why not ask her?"
"Why not just be patient for a while and let things ride as they are a little longer?"
"Do you really want to go around mooning over a boy who seems to have shaken you off completely?"
She also employed the universal buttress for any argument, "Don't you agree?"
Apart from dealing out commonsense counsel as Fairfax, McCarroll had a second life as a writer and journalist using her own name. She broke ground as a business journalist. She wrote short stories while working as a publicist in the late 1930s. She also wrote about house and home. Her "Summer Cookbook" was published in 1954.
Roots in Ridgewood
McCarroll was born in 1891 in East Orange. In 1910, she graduated from the Beard School — now Morristown-Beard — and four years later left Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She had a bachelor's degree and no strong feelings about a future career. "Having no conspicuous talents of any description naturally made it a little difficult for me," she told the Baltimore and Ohio employee magazine in 1937. "All I knew was that I had to earn my own living and be as quick as possible about it."
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During her first summer after college, McCarroll worked for the Fresh Air Fund. Based at the New York Tribune, she said she was left with a pleasant impression of the newsroom and committed herself to finding a job in one. "The newspaper business and I simply were made for each other," she told The Ridgewood News in August 1932.
After spending time as a special needs teacher and then a stenographer, McCarroll joined the staff of The Ridgewood News in the early 1920s. She would later work for The Editor, another Ridgewood newspaper. McCarroll lived in Ridgewood, at least part-time, for most of the rest of her life. She spent her last seven years at the Allendale Nursing Home off Route 17. She died there in 1977 at age 84.
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During her life, she also maintained a summer cottage in Bradford, Vermont with her sister, and spent a lot of her time in New York City. Her first newspaper job there was with the Commercial, a financial newspaper. She wanted a reporter's post. She was offered a secretary position. "Somebody is always trying to put something in life to make it just that much harder for us girls," she would later quip.
McCarroll worked as the editor's secretary at the Commercial for two years, sporadically penning the random article. Eventually, her talent saw her tossed into the newsroom. "I thought I was pretty swell being a woman and doing men's work and all that, but after a year I instinctively and ignominiously reverted to type," she told The Ridgewood News. "Gradually, I slid into exclusively feminine stuff."
At the Commercial, McCarroll secured her first column, called "Women in Business." She also became the first woman to gain a press pass at the New York Stock Exchange. Her work caught the attention of other publications. During the 1920s, she simultaneously wrote features for the New York Sunday World and edited the women's page for the New York Evening Post. She stayed at the Post until the mid-'30s, becoming president of the Newswomen's Club of New York for the first time along the way. First elected in 1930, she would reclaim the post in 1949.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Meet Ridgewood's Marion Clyde McCarroll, an advice column pioneer
