The best-loved newspaper columnist in Detroit history

When Nancy Brown died in October 1948 — in a season of "blue skies and swirling orange and gold," as one letter-writer described it — thousands of people grieved. 

They were Detroit News readers, but they were more than that. They were a community. 

Nancy Brown, which was not her real name, wrote an advice column for The News, called "Experience." It made her a celebrity — an anonymous one, for most of her career — and culminated in the construction of the Peace Carillon on Belle Isle, which bears her famous alias.

"Experience" debuted in 1919. People wrote in with questions large and small: How to throw a wedding for your child when you have no money to spend? How to find a job to help you get yourself through college? (Signed: "Ambitious.") How are we coiffing our hair these days? Can you can dandelion greens? Some people wrote in with no questions at all, but shared a personal story or offered an out-of-the-blue opinion. Nancy always answered: earnestly, encouragingly, tenderly most of the time, tough when the job called for it. To those who had no questions, she simply said, "Write us again." 

Her real name was Annie Louise Brown, and she was born in Perry, Maine, in 1870. She went to Mount Holyoke College and worked as a school teacher — working, for a time, in Mount Clemens — before marrying James Edward Leslie, an editor for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, in 1904. After his death in 1917, she took over his job at the Dispatch, then came back to Michigan, where she still had friends, and joined The News. 

Within three months, her column had gone from a Saturday feature to a daily affair, and her following grew. God knows how many letters she opened every day. What to do about a daughter going "a trifle wild?" How should two families living together to save money split their expenses? Letter-writers adopted their own monikers and became acquainted with one another through the pages of "Experience" —  "Questioning Eyes," "Mr. and Mrs. Joker," "Spinning Wheel." They supported and encouraged each other, chimed in with their own advice, fawned over cute photos of babies and kids. Nancy engaged with her readers, too. In the Christmas season of 1930, she asked readers to send in their "ideas of happiness," and called those she had not heard from yet out by name (well, alias): "Where's my Rag Carpet, and my Connecticut Yankee, and my Fleur, and our Gingham Grandma? I am calling the roll. Please." 

And then Nancy's "Column Folks" started to come off the page.

In 1929, The News began a campaign to reforest huge swaths of Northern Michigan that had been clear-cut by loggers. The News, in partnership with the state Department of Conservation, offered plots of 40 acres to be seeded with new pines for a $100 donation. A letter writer going by the name "Andy" proposed that Experience readers raise their own $100 to seed a plot. Readers raised enough money — in small sums, 10 cents here, a dollar there — to plant 14 plots, a total of 560 acres reclaimed. Each plot carried a sign that read: "These 40 acres planted in 1930 by the Experience Column in honor of Nancy Brown."

Nancy planted the first seedling.

The idea to throw a "column party" at the Detroit Institute of Arts came from a reader who went by the name Solveig. Nancy thought it was a wonderful suggestion, and so did the museum's director, William Valentiner. A date was set, and on Nov. 14, 1930, a crowd of more than 30,000 people descended on the DIA, backing traffic up for miles. Nancy was there, mingling anonymously with her mob: "My idea is that we all go under our Column names, not disclose our true identity in a single instance," she had proposed. "It will be a unique masquerade, without mask or special costume."

The column folks kept the spirit of the DIA party alive after that through a years-long fundraising campaign to purchase and donate artworks for the DIA's collection, again through small donations of a few cents or dollars at a time. The first acquisition of the Detroit News Nancy Brown Experience Column Picture Fund was "Street in Brooklyn," made by an anonymous American painter in the late 1880s. A comparatively modest crowd of 11,000 people came to the unveiling. The columnist's 5-year-old grandniece, Nancy Brown II, pulled the cord that drew aside the velvet veil. A reader known as Blossom came all the way from Louisville for the occasion. "Our one regret was that Doctorette, who suggested the painting, was unable to be present," Nancy wrote the next day. One newspaper reporter called it "the greatest party Detroit ever had."

A year later, the column folks did it again, presenting the museum with a portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, painted by Rembrandt Peale. Nancy once again delegated her grandniece, then 7, to do the honors, so that she could remain unrecognized in the crowd.

The Experience column family also organized a series of six Detroit Symphony Orchestra concerts, collectively choosing musical selections for the program. The entire series of concerts sold out, with hundreds turned away. "If there are any lofty-domed scholars and savants who think that public taste, casually canvassed, is necessarily vulgar taste, they should have been in Orchestra Hall Saturday evening," The News's music critic, Russell McLauchlin, wrote of one of the concerts.

In 1934, Nancy Band her column family launched the Sunday Service, an annual religious gathering on Belle Isle that, true to column folks form, attracted tens of thousands of people. Two years later, the column folks launched a formal campaign to build a bell tower at the site of the Sunday Service: a monument to peace, and a monument to Nancy Brown.

Thousands of readers — at the height of the Great Depression — chipped in pennies or a dollar, or two, or five. Quilting clubs, knitting clubs, bridge clubs, church groups and Ladies Auxiliaries took up collections. Individuals made gifts in honor of friends, mothers, sisters, children and lost loved ones. They raised nearly $59,000, worth over $1 million today.

A crowd of 50,000 people attended the sunrise service and tower dedication on June 17, 1940, when News publisher William E. Scripps, editor William Gilmore and the mayors of Detroit and Windsor were on hand to celebrate, along with musicians and faith leaders from five Christian congregations and one Jewish synagogue.

But the guest of honor was Nancy herself. She was finally ready to take off the mask of anonymity. Here was Nancy, here was Annie, a small white-haired woman in an elegant fur-trimmed coat. And when the Scripps and Gilmore unveiled the tower's bronze doors — a gift from The Detroit News — there was her face, in a bas relief portrait, there to be recognized for the rest of time.

Two years later, Nancy Brown retired. Some readers were shocked, even bereaved. ("I must be dreaming, I just must be. No? Well, then I'm going with you, yep, I'll retire, too," wrote reader Sleepy Pepper.) But all wished her well and promised to welcome the new Experience columnist, writing under the pen name Jane Lee, graciously. The column ran occasional updates for the column family about how Nancy was doing.

In July 1948, The News reported that Nancy had fallen ill and was hospitalized. She returned home to convalesce the following month, but never fully recovered, and she died October 7. She was 77.

On the day of the funeral — held at Central Woodward Christian Church, with burial after the service at Oak View Cemetery in Royal Oak — a carillonneur went to the Peace Tower and played Nancy's favorite hymns. The Detroit News hooked up a telephone connection from the island so the music would be heard during the church service and at the cemetery. 

Reader letters poured in for weeks: "She made me so happy so many times. She was my second mother." "My dear grandmother passed away many years ago, and since then, I have always put Nancy in her place." "Her work was that of a minister, and thousands must remember that through her grand and selfless service their lives are richer."

In the first book of collected Nancy Brown columns, published by The Detroit News in 1932 — it would publish eight of them in total — Nancy wrote in the introduction that in its first few weeks, the column had first run without a byline. But later, "it seemed best to add," she wrote, "because of the popular tradition that the editors of such columns are men addicted to corncob pipes." 

When women editors and reporters finally pushed their way into American newsrooms, they were often relegated to the "women's pages," to write about cooking and clothing and who went to which party. In the 1970s, women staffers at The Detroit News, led by reporter Mary Lou Butcher, sued for sex discrimination on exactly this basis. Nancy's "housewife problems" columns could have had the same pigeonholing effect.

But everyone loved Nancy Brown: housewives as well as their husbands, school children, young men, old women. Nancy showed the power of what could happen in those pages — and what women could build.