Another person from my past is gone ... watched her on TV for much of my life. She was also a guest of many quiz shows, and the Tonight show ............
Joyce Brothers, a former academic psychologist who, long before Drs. Ruth, Phil and Laura, was counseling millions over the airwaves, died on Monday at her home in Fort Lee, N.J. She was 85.
Dr. Joyce Brothers engulfed by mail from radio listeners after she kept a suicidal caller on the phone until help could arrive.
Dr. Joyce Brothers, as she was always known professionally — a full-name hallmark of the more formal times in which she began her career — was widely described as the mother of mass-media psychology because of the firm, pragmatic and homiletic guidance she administered for decades via radio and television.
Historically, she was a bridge between advice columnists like Dear Abby and Ann Landers, who got their start in the mid-1950s, and the self-help advocates of the 1970s and afterward.
