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Dix: She made her writing debut in N.O,
From D-1
?Dear Dorothy Dix . . .? was the call for help by America?s unhappy, confused and isolated for the next 54 years, through two world wars, suffrage, the Depression and countless shifts in politics, fashion, style and sexuality.
She was an ambassador for the > city and the newspaper, a legend,' a hero and, in the words of admiring journalist Ernie Pyle: ?a damn good newspaperman.? I-
Love means caring for some--body more than yourself. It is putting somebody else?s pleasure and happiness and well-being above your own. It is sacrificing yourself for another and enjoying doing it. It is the world being all t right when someone is with you and all wrong when he or she is absent. It is knowing someone?s every fault and blemish and not caring. No one can define it; it just is.
?
Elizabeth Meriwether was born on the Tennessee-Kentucky border seven months before the start of the Civil War.
Her father joined the Confederate army but never saw battle; he was in ?delicate health,? according to Dix biographer Harriett Kane, and was sent home.
His constitution passed onto his eldest daughter. Elizabeth was bom premature: ?She looked like a sick bird, before the feathers had time to start,? Kane quotes a relative. ?Hands like wax, the size of a quarter piece.?
Nevertheless, she fought for her life, survived, and grew up precocious and literary, though she would always be frail of health.
The family land, a tranquil farm called Woodstock, was frequently pillaged during the war, and she was born into the era of fading Southern gentry, in a once-well-to-do family lineage with diminishing means.
She was the tomboyish protector of two siblings whose parents dragged them back and forth across the two state borders, always searching for a better place 5'Or a better job that never came.
Forced early to fend for herself,
_ .she immersed herself in reading and writing. She was versed in Shakespeare and Dickens by age 12; she published her own newspaper at 15.
She won several school, community and magazine writing contests and began to fancy herself a scribe.
She read and wrote tirelessly and began to submit stories to newspapers around the South. She was published, for pennies an article, then dollars.
Along the way, Lizzie Meriwether made an incalculable mistake. Afraid her petite dowdiness would render her husbandless forever, she married George Gilmer, her stepmother's brother a not-uncommon event along the deep woods borders they inhabited.
He was a bore, a layabout and mentally, financially and physically unstable most all their nearly 40 years of marriage.
A woman?s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast every-thing is cinders, ashes and dust to her.	j
Her husband?s many failed i business enterprises and pipe-dreams swallowed every penny they had. From the beginning, they were estranged; all their lives people would marvel that they ever married.
At 32, childless and despon- j dent, she had a nervous break- I down. It was the best thing that J ever happened to her.
Her father tookjier to Ihe s8iS8?ppi GiilF?Coast to recover, ! and there she met Eliza Jane ! Poitevent, who, at 27, had wound up publisher of the New Orleans Picayune by virtue of her husband?s sudden death.
The two strong-willed women became fast friends and Poitevent brought Gilmer to New Orleans to work at the paper.
She settled on Camp Street and into a routine of small but necessary tasks at the paper; amassing birth and death notices, compiling recipes, that sort of j thing. Major Nathaniel Burbank, the editor at the time, called her a ?little canary,? and offered her a chance to cover the then-vibrant , theater life of the city.
Her writing showed promise from the start and steadily matured.
She started writing longer pieces for the Sunday section of the paper until Burbank and Poitevent ? now Eliza Nicholson by a new marriage ? assigned her her own column, on any matters she wished to discuss. They told her to call it anything she wanted and this gave her an opportunity she always dreamed of: A chance to get rid of the name Lizzie, which she had hated from the day she first heard it.
She chose the name Dorothy because she liked the ring of it, and Dix in memory of a Mr. Dicks, a black family servant from the family?s last years of wealth back at Woodstock.
Under her new name, she took the town, then the nation, then the world, by storm.
?It came to me that everything in the world had been written about women for women except the truth,? she said at the time.
She set out to correct this.