In 1955, the Lederers moved to Chicago. By now Mrs. Lederer was an affluent housewife and the mother of a daughter. She was deeply invested in being married, so much so that she had the words ''Jules's Wife'' stitched into the linings of her fur coats.

The Chicago Democratic machine would not have her (''We don't need any more hell raisers,'' she recalled being told), and Mrs. Lederer cast about for something else as an outlet for her boundless energy.

She noticed an advice column in The Chicago Sun-Times called Ask Ann Landers.

''I thought it was a good column, but not great,'' Mrs. Lederer recalled in a 1990 interview. ''When I read it, I would cover up her answers and think about what I would have said if I had been Ann Landers.''

On an impulse, she called a friend who was a Sun-Times executive and asked whether she could help the advice columnist answer some of her mail. The timing was serendipitous. It turned out that the columnist, a nurse named Ruth Crowley, had died the week before, and the paper was holding a contest among 28 of the women at The Sun-Times to find a new Ann Landers. Mrs. Lederer, who had never held a paying job or written a word for publication, became the 29th contestant.

She was given a stack of letters and asked to answer them. The first was from a woman who owned a walnut tree that was dropping nuts into her next-door neighbor's yard. A fight had erupted over who owned the fallen nuts.

''I knew this was a legal question, and I began to wonder how high up in legal circles I could go for the answer to impress the contest judges,'' Mrs. Lederer recalled in 1990.

Deciding to settle only for the best, she called up Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, a friend from her Democratic Party days. The answer, he said, was that the neighbor could do anything with the nuts but sell them.