"Dear Prudence"&"PruPointers'
The Birth and Evolution of a Cultural Icon



Today, Prudence McCoy is a name, and a face, known around the world. Elegant, sophisticated and worldly, she's dined at the White House, hosted 'Saturday Night Live' and graced the cover of 'Rolling Stone' – twice. Martha Stewart considers her a friend and an inspiration.
For the past decade, Prudence Mary McCoy has continued, and expanded, the work begun by her mother, Prudence Morris McCoy, nearly forty years ago. What her mother started as a modest newsletter ("PruPointers") of helpful household hints has grown into a media empire.
The helpful hints and practical solutions to every day problems provided by "Pru Pointers" are read and seen by tens of millions of ardent fans everywhere in the world. The "PruPointers" column is syndicated in over six hundred newspapers and translated into thirty-three different languages. The "Pru Pointers" television show is beamed to over one hundred and seventy countries. "PruPointer" books have sold more than fifty million copies.
The audience for "PruPointers" is eclectic and international, serving a global village which transcends cultural differences and geographical boundaries. People as different and diverse as Bedouin nomads, bankers in Bangladesh and Belgium homemakers turn to "PruPointers" to solve perplexing every day problems. The Peace Corps provides each of its volunteers with a copy of "PruPointers" when they're posted to locations around the world.
"PruPointers" was voted Best Known Brand by the International Product Branding Association for the last five years. It's been estimated that "PruPointers" is recognized by more people than Coca Cola or Brittany Spears.
"PruPointers" is an amazing success story which had its humble beginnings, nearly fifty years ago, at the breakfast room table of a recently widowed mother in Flushing, Queens, New York.
The year was 1963. The husband of English-born PRUDENCE MORRIS MCCOY had just died of a sudden heart attack, leaving behind a three year old daughter, a whack of bills and a young wife with no formal job training. Prudence Morris McCoy was suddenly on her own, three thousand miles from her family in England and, as she later recalled in her autobiography, Pointing the Way, "… I barely had twopence to my name. I wasn't quite broke, but I was badly bent".
To help make ends meet, and stay at home with her little girl, Prudence began writing and selling a newsletter of practical solutions to household problems.
Having come from a long line of hard-working, pragmatic and clever English and Scottish women who had raised large families on little money, Prudence Morris McCoy had accumulated a treasure trove of inexpensive solutions to everyday wrinkles in domestic life. She called them 'hints', just as her favorite aunt Penelope had done and dubbed her newsletter "Helpful Hints for Harried Housewives".
In the beginning, Prudence sold her monthly newsletter door-to-door, pulling her toddler daughter – PRUDENCE MARY MCCOY -- and bundles of the newsletter through the neighborhood in the little girl's red wagon.
Always the proper Englishwoman, Prudence wore a dress, coat and proper shoes, through summer heat and winter chill. Her majestic bearing and demeanor quickly earned her the title of 'The Queen of Queens' on the streets. Her daughter was dubbed The Princess.
The newsletter was an instant success. With new 'hints' in every newsletter, many submitted by loyal readers, the newsletter quickly became an essential staple in thousands of homes throughout the boroughs of New York City. When readers began to write Prudence with questions of their own, Prudence was happy to provide hints for every problem.
The popularity of the newsletter caught the attention of JEFFREY SYMCOX, an aspiring young newspaper publisher who had just started a weekly paper called 'The Back Fence Bulletin', affectionately known to its readers as the "BFB".
Symcox filled the "BFB" with neighborhood news, local tidbits and juicy gossip, just the sort of 'news' his readers might get over their own backyard fences. Prudence McCoy's column of helpful hints was just the sort of thing his readers loved.
Symcox convinced Prudence to change the name of her column to "PruPointers" and in 1965 he began to feature it in the BFB.
Over the next twenty-five years, "PruPointers" continued its phenomenal growth. The column was syndicated in papers around the world. Prudence wrote a series of hugely successful books –'Pru Pointers' -- that provided helpful hints for her growing audience. It seemed that everyone had a problem, big or small. Prudence had the answers.
When Prudence Morris MacIntyre died in 2005, after more than forty years of writing "Dear Prudence", readers around the world mourned her passing. For many, it was as though they had lost a beloved and trusted family member.
In 2006, "Dear Prudence" returned. Despite her colorful and successful career in publishing, Prudence Mary has been convinced by Jeffrey Symcox to continue her mother's work.
From the moment she agreed to pick up where her mother had left off, however, Prudence Mary McCoy -- Pru2', as she's affectionately called by Jeffrey Symcox, the staff at "Dear Prudence" and her millions of fan -- made it clear that she was not going to be her mother.
Pru2 was not a proper Englishwoman. She was not reclusive, taciturn and polite. She was not interested in treading water and doing things the 'right way'. She was going to do things her way. Things were going to change.
Pru2 told Jeffrey Symcox, the publisher of "Pru Pointers", she was "going to drag 'PruPointers' kicking and screaming into the new millennium or put it out of its bloody misery".
Prudence Mary McCoy was born in London before the family had moved to New York. Growing up as the only child of a working, and increasingly busy, mother, Prudence often wished her mother had possessed the interest or the energy to have more children. After her husband died, however, Prudence Morris McCoy didn't have enough of either resource. Prudence Mary learned to entertain and depend on herself, two talents that were to serve her well in her own life.
When Prudence was eight, her mother enrolled her at the Berkhamsted School for Girls, in Hertfordshire, England – 'exiled me,' according to Pru2 -- nestled away in a bucolic corner of England where she hoped her headstrong Prudence Mary would stay out of the trouble she'd already started getting into.
No such luck. Young Prudence Mary immediately rebelled against the rules and regulations at Berkhamsted – it all reminded too much of living at home with her mother – and for the next several years she proved to a colorful and unpredictable 'pain in the arse' for the hapless Headmaster, Mr. Ian McLeighton. Had it not been for her mother's growing success, and fame, there's no doubt Pru2 would have been tossed out of Berkhamsted and sent packing.
Instead, she stayed, graduated second in her class and went on to Cambridge where she took a First in English Literature. Having proven to her mother that she could do anything she wanted to do – if she wanted to, that is – she promptly jumped on the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle and took off on an eight month tour of Europe. She didn't write home.
Having sown those wild oats, Prudence came back to England, moved into a run down flat in Notting Hill Gate (before it was cool) and started the trendy fashion magazine 'A-Z' which quickly became the Bible of the European haute couture fashion industry.
Just as her mother had been the Queen of Queens, Prudence became the Queen of Chelsea, a visible and colorful figure in the go-go fashion world of glitzy models, extravagant fashion shows, outrageous designs and deliciously decadent living. Prudence burned more than a few candles at both ends. Living in New York City, her mother watched from a distance, shocked and critical of her daughter's excesses. Which, of course, is precisely what Pru2
Despite her success and celebrity – or perhaps because of it and the exhausting toll it was taking on her -- when Jeffrey Symcox asked in 2006 if she would be interested in continuing her mother's work, much to Jeffrey's surprise, Prudence said yes. Having been shuffled to the edges of her busy mother's life as a young girl, Prudence saw this as an opportunity to reconnect to her mother.
And, yes, to do the job better than her mother. There was always a bit of a competitive spark between the two women, one that was only fed by Pru2's successes and her mother's reluctance to acknowledge that success.
Young, creative and technically sophisticated, Prudence quickly expanded her mother's work after she died. While continuing to write the "PruPointers" column and publishing helpful hints books, Prudence embraced the Internet, creating a popular interactive website and writing a widely read 'blog'. A syndicated television show, "PruPointers" is enjoyed by fans around the world.
Prudence Mary McCoy travels around the world for book signings, conventions and conferences where she is the featured speaker, attracting thousands of her fans.