DEAR MARGO

Margo Howard bombed into my life, rattled me in all the best ways, and then had the gall to leave me just two years later.

I’ve been traveling, and learned this weekend that the saucy daughter of a legend, and an author, prodigious writer and reporter of her own repute died two weeks ago.

Howard was 86, and a woman of all times.

Terrible thing when the bright lights in our lives fall from the sky, and are buried behind the mountains for good.

Margo was irreverent, but mostly smart as a whip, and straight-line direct, so when she introduced herself this way, shortly before Thanksgiving of 2024, my holiday weekend was made.

Earl,

My mother was Ann Landers. She had the largest client list of any text column. (1200 papers. Only a few of the comic strip guys had more papers.)

What I wanted you to know was that it meant a great deal to her to be in Stars and Stripes. I’m guessing that may have been your call. She cared so much about our servicemen and women that she went to visit the military hospitals in Vietnam. (That’s a whole other story.)

Anyway, I know your work because other Stack people print it. I subscribed when I saw you had your own Stack. You are really good.

A new reader, and fan.

Margo

As the one-time Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes, I had little to nothing to do with the decision to run her mother’s legendary work. It was the readers who had everything to do with that. In survey after survey, Ann Landers was popular, so we kept her on to help sell newspapers.

Simple as that.

The bit about me, however, hit right at the warm spot toward the center of my ego, because I knew exactly who Margo was. I had come across her here and there on the perimeter of the publishing world, and occasionally rifled through her clever Dear Prudence advice columns in Slate, and Dear Margo offerings at the Boston Globe.

I knew little about her besides, because she lived one helluva full life, and I wondered how even she kept track of it all.

So we were off, and fairly steady penpals for the next 20 months. I’ve been reading through our many exchanges over the weekend, and they have given me life amid the news of her death.

Many of our give-and-takes were brief and newsy, and discussed the endless bile coming out of Mar-a-Lago. For all her savvy and wit, she had no good answers for America’s second-greatest sin.

She did keep me straight on things, though, and I appreciated that. Like the time I went off on a verbal pity party about the stress of an impending move across the country.

She had just nine words for all of that:

Moving is hell, but that's why there are wives.

As usual that was the jolt I needed, because she was exactly right. While I was whining to Margo, my wife was quietly and doggedly doing the 127 things that needed doing to get us from Wisconsin to North Carolina.

Like me, Margo was married more than twice. She kept the name Howard, after a divorce from the actor Ken Howard, who coincidentally was a favorite of mine and the star of the ‘70s TV series, White Shadow.

She seemed to know everybody who was anybody in the publishing world, and dropped some first-class gossip in my lap, which I won’t repeat here.

Sorry.

I do like how NPR’s Scott Simon put it in his lede mentioning Margo’s death:

Margo Howard was the person you’d hope to be seated next to at a dinner party, to hear her purr anecdotes and observations about all the other guests.

I’m at that age where friends and family are starting to leave me forever. And because I am a cynic, and an animal-lover, most people endlessly disappoint me.

It just feels like it’s always the wrong ones like Margo, who go first.

When an email I typed her went unanswered for a couple of days last week, I just knew …

I also know what Margo would tell me right now as I grieve her loss:

“Life’s too short, Earl, get over it. Celebrate the memories, and what you still have.”

OK … but life still won’t be the same without you, Margo.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

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