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Dear Ed: It's O.K. with me. But tell her to put on an apron when she's frying bacon.

Pauline Phillips, a California housewife who nearly 60 years ago, seeking something more meaningful than mah-jongg, transformed herself into the syndicated columnist Dear Abby — and in so doing became a trusted, tart-tongued adviser to tens of millions — died on Wednesday in Minneapolis. She was 94.

Her syndicate, Universal Uclick, announced her death on its Web site. A longtime resident of Beverly Hills, Calif., Mrs. Phillips, who had been ill with Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade, had lived in Minneapolis in recent years to be near family.

If Damon Runyon and Groucho Marx had gone jointly into the advice business, their column would have read much like Dear Abby's. With her comic and flinty yet fundamentally sympathetic voice, Mrs. Phillips helped wrestle the advice column from its weepy Victorian past into a hard-nosed 20th-century present:

Dear Abby: I have always wanted to have my family history traced, but I can't afford to spend a lot of money to do it. Have you any suggestions? — M.J.B. in Oakland, Calif.

Dear M.J.B.: Yes. Run for a public office.

Mrs. Phillips began her life as Abigail Van Buren in 1956 and quickly became known for her astringent, often genteelly risqué, replies to queries that included the marital, the medical and sometimes both at once:

Dear Abby: Are birth control pills deductible? — Bertie

Dear Bertie: Only if they don't work.

She was also known for her long, much-publicized professional rivalry with her identical twin sister, the advice columnist Ann Landers.

Long before the Internet — and long before the pervasive electronic confessionals of Drs. Ruth, Phil, Laura, et al. — the Dear Abby column was a forum for the public discussion of private problems, read by tens of millions of people in hundreds of newspapers around the world.

It is difficult to overstate the column's influence on American culture at midcentury and afterward: in popular parlance, "Dear Abby" was for decades an affectionate synonym for a trusted, if slightly campy, confidante.

On television, the column has been invoked on shows as diverse as "Three's Company," "Dexter" and "Mr. Ed," where, in a 1964 episode in which Mrs. Phillips plays herself, the title character, pining (in an equine way, of course) for a swinging bachelor pad of his own, writes her a letter.

Over the years, recording artists including the Hearts, John Prine and the Dead Kennedys have released a string of different songs titled "Dear Abby."

Even now, Dear Abby's reach is vast. (Mrs. Phillips's daughter, Jeanne Phillips, took over the column unofficially in 1987 and officially in 2000.) According to its syndicator, Universal Uclick, Dear Abby appears in about 1,400 newspapers worldwide, has a daily readership of more than 110 million — in print and on its interactive Web site, dearabby.com — and receives more than 10,000 letters and e-mails a week.

Politically left of center, Mrs. Phillips was generally conservative when it came to personal deportment. As late as the 1990s she was reluctant to advise unmarried couples to live together. Yet beneath her crackling one-liners lay an imperturbable acceptance of the vagaries of modern life:

Dear Abby: Our son married a girl when he was in the service. They were married in February and she had an 8 1/2-pound baby girl in August. She said the baby was premature. Can an 8 1/2-pound baby be this premature? — Wanting to Know

Dear Wanting: The baby was on time. The wedding was late. Forget it.

Mrs. Phillips was also keen, genteelly, to keep pace with the times. In 1976 she confided to People magazine that she had recently seen an X-rated movie. Her sister, she learned afterward, had wanted to see it, too, but feared being recognized.

"How did you get away with it?" Ann Landers asked Dear Abby.

"Well," Dear Abby replied breezily, "I just put on my dark glasses and my Ann Landers wig and went!"

The youngest of four sisters, Pauline Esther Friedman, familiarly known as Popo, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on July 4, 1918. Her twin, Esther Pauline (known as Eppie), beat her into the world by 17 minutes, just as she would narrowly beat her into the advice business.

Their father, Abraham, was a Jewish immigrant from Vladivostok, Russia, who had made his start in the United States as an itinerant chicken peddler and, in an archetypal American success story, ended up owning a chain of movie theaters.

The twins attended Morningside College in Sioux City, where they both studied journalism and psychology and wrote a joint gossip column for the school paper.

As close as they were, the intense competitiveness that would later spill into the public arena was already apparent. "She wanted to be the first violin in the school orchestra, but I was," Mrs. Phillips told Life magazine in 1958. "She swore she'd marry a millionaire, but I did."

In 1939, Pauline Friedman left college to marry Morton Phillips, an heir to a liquor fortune. She was married in a lavish double ceremony alongside Eppie, who, not to be outdone, was wed on the same day to Jules Lederer, a salesman who later founded the Budget Rent A Car corporation.

As a young bride, Mrs. Phillips lived in Eau Claire, Wis., where her husband was an executive with the National Pressure Cooker Company, which his family had acquired.

"It never occurred to me that I'd have any kind of career," Mrs. Phillips told The Los Angeles Times in 1986. "But after I was married, I thought, 'There has to be something more to life than mah-jongg.' "

She took up civic work training hospital volunteers, an experience that helped lay the foundation for her future calling. "I learned how to listen," Mrs. Phillips told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1989. "Sometimes, when people come to you with a problem, the best thing you can do is listen."

In 1955, Mrs. Phillips's twin, now Eppie Lederer, took over the Ann Landers column for The Chicago Sun-Times. A rank beginner soon swamped by a flood of mail, she began sending batches of letters to her sister — for advice, as it were.

"I provided the sharp answers," Mrs. Phillips told The Ladies' Home Journal in 1981. "I'd say, 'You're writing too long (she still does), and this is the way I'd say it.' " She added, "My stuff was published — and it looked awfully good in print."

So good that when The Sun-Times later forbade Mrs. Lederer to send letters out of the office, Mrs. Phillips, by this time living in the Bay Area, vowed to find a column of her own.

She phoned The San Francisco Chronicle, identifying herself as a local housewife who thought she could do better than the advice columnist the paper already had. "If you're ever in the neighborhood," the features editor said rhetorically, "come in and see me."

Mrs. Phillips took him at his word and the next morning appeared unannounced in the newsroom in a Dior dress. She had prudently left her chauffeured Cadillac around the corner.

If only to get rid of her, the editor handed her a stack of back issues, telling her to compose her own replies to the letters in the advice column. She did so in characteristic style and dropped off her answers at the paper. She arrived home to a ringing telephone. The job was hers — at $20 a week.

Mrs. Phillips chose her pen name herself, taking Abigail after the prophetess in the Book of Samuel ("Then David said to Abigail ... 'Blessed is your advice and blessed are you' ") and Van Buren for its old-family, presidential ring. Her first column appeared on Jan. 9, 1956, less than three months after her sister's debut.

An immediate success, the column was quickly syndicated. But with Mrs. Phillips's growing renown came a growing estrangement from her twin, as Dear Abby and Ann Landers battled each other in syndication. According to many accounts, the sisters did not speak for five years, reconciling only in the mid-1960s.

Mrs. Lederer died in 2002, at 83. Besides her daughter, Jeanne, Mrs. Phillips is survived by her husband of 73 years, Mort Phillips; four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. A son, Edward, died in 2011 at 66.

Her columns have been collected in several book-length anthologies, including "Dear Abby on Marriage" (1962) and "The Best of Dear Abby" (1981). From 1963 to 1975, Mrs. Phillips also had a daily "Dear Abby" program on CBS Radio.

In 1982, in a rare professional misstep, Mrs. Phillips acknowledged that she had recycled old letters for use in contemporary columns. (In the kind of parallel experience that seemed to define their lives together, Mrs. Lederer had acknowledged earlier that year to running recycled letters in Ann Landers's column.)

But until her retirement in 2000, Mrs. Phillips remained a trusted adviser in a world that had evolved from discussions of the dainty art of naked bacon-making to all manner of postmodern angst:

Dear Abby: Two men who claim to be father and adopted son just bought an old mansion across the street and fixed it up. We notice a very suspicious mixture of company coming and going at all hours — blacks, whites, Orientals, women who look like men and men who look like women. ... This has always been considered one of the finest sections of San Francisco, and these weirdos are giving it a bad name. How can we improve the neighborhood? — Nob Hill Residents

Dear Residents: You could move.

The deadline for submission of a teacher evaluation plan to state education officials is midnight, and the statement by the union, the United Federation of Teachers, implied the deadline would be missed. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday morning that he would not extend the deadline; missing it would cost the city $250 million in education aid from Albany and possibly $200 million in grants.

In a statement issued at 1:50 p.m., Michael Mulgrew, the president of the union, laid the blame for the failure at the feet of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Mr. Mulgrew said that he had notified Mr. Cuomo and other state officials that, "despite long nights of negotiation and a willingness on the part of teachers" to meet the city's Department of Education halfway in any deal, the Bloomberg administration's intransigence on prime issues got in the way.

"It is particularly painful to make this announcement because last night our negotiators had reached agreement – but Mayor Bloomberg blew the deal up in the early hours today, and despite the involvement of state officials we could not put it back together," Mr. Mulgrew said in his statement.

It went on, referring to the school bus strike that began Wednesday: "Thousands of parents have gotten a lesson this week, as the mayor's `my way or the highway' approach has left thousands of schoolchildren stranded at curbs across the city by the school bus strike. That same stubborn attitude on the mayor's part now means that our schools will suffer a loss of millions of dollars in state aid."

The mayor had scheduled a 2:30 p.m. news conference to discuss the negotiations. A spokesman for the office of John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, declined to immediately comment.

Whether the union's move was a final threat to try to eke out a more favorable deal, or was truly the end of negotiations, remained unclear.

The events come after years of legislative maneuvers, negotiations that seemed to start and stall and, in recent weeks, an increasingly nasty round of acrimonious exchanges between those in the union and Mayor Bloomberg.

Both sides claimed that a solution was too important to let slip through their grasp. Yet, New York City in recent days remained one of only a small number of the 700 school districts in the state not to have submitted their plans to Mr. King's office.

The issue had its beginnings in 2010, when Gov. David A. Paterson signed legislation that was used to persuade the Obama administration to award the state a nearly $700 million Race to the Top grant. The law, since strengthened, required school districts to replace old evaluation systems that were criticized as reflecting too little on teacher performance by issuing marks of "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory."

"Unsatisfactory" marks were rarely given and the new system had at its heart a goal of helping school systems identify meaningful teaching while more easily stripping out and firing inefficient teachers.

Though the Legislature approved the broad outlines of the new teacher evaluation system, it left each district to negotiate the details with the teachers' unions. Thursday is the deadline for submitting those negotiated plans to the state.

"Today is the final deadline for the handful of school districts, including New York City, that have failed to get their teacher evaluation systems in place," Mr. Cuomo said Thursday. "Please hear me — there will be no extensions or exceptions."

The $5.8 million building was being constructed for the Chestnut Hill Friends, a Quaker community in a northern section of Philadelphia. Cuts in the steel columns that make up the building's frame were made with an acetylene torch, indicating that the attack was carried out by someone with both the equipment and the expertise to operate it, the police say, suggesting that it may have been the work of trade unionists who were disgruntled after being refused work on the site.

"It's not being done by 12-year-old vandals," said Lt. George McClay of the Philadelphia Police northwest detectives division, which is leading an investigation into the episode. Fire officials are treating the attack on the crane as arson.

Asked whether the damage might have been an attempt at intimidation by union members, Lieutenant McClay said: "It does point in that direction. Can I prove it? Absolutely not."

Pat Gillespie, business manager of the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents about 60,000 construction workers in 42 local unions, rejected suggestions that members were responsible for vandalizing the meeting house. He said that the relatively small project would not generate enough union work to explain any such attack, and that union members would not want to jeopardize chances of future work by alienating potential employers.

The episode may have been a result of a payment dispute, he said. "Maybe that person had business dealings that didn't go too well."

Four union members visited the site during the week before the overnight attack on Dec. 20-21, asking questions about who was doing specific construction tasks, said Robert N. Reeves Jr., the president of E. Allen Reeves Inc., the contractor. The company operates an "open shop" that does not employ union members but may work with unionized subcontractors, Mr. Reeves said.

Each of the union members left the site after being told by employees that they could not give out information about the construction, Mr. Reeves said. The fourth told the site manager on Dec. 17 that "I'll do what I have to do," said the manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The vandalism has led the eastern Pennsylvania chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, to offer a $50,000 reward to anyone whose information leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible.

The episode is the latest in Philadelphia to prompt allegations that trade unions engage in violence and intimidation in an effort to secure work for their members.

In mid-December, an employee of Post Brothers Apartments, a local developer, was attacked with a crowbar by a member of the Ironworkers Union, according to Michael Pestronk, chief executive of the company. Post Brothers is in a dispute with local unions over its refusal to hire all-union labor to work on an apartment building in central Philadelphia

Mr. Gillespie said he was not aware that any union member had used a crowbar to attack Post Brothers employees, and he accused Mr. Pestronk of "exaggerating" the confrontations that have occurred at the site. "There have been some pushing and shoving instances that have happened on that site that I'm aware of," Mr. Gillespie said. "If anyone gets assaulted with a crowbar, that's a serious charge, a felony offense."

Post Brothers initially wanted to hire 40 percent union labor on the project, converting a factory into 163 loft apartments, but is using all nonunion workers after unions withdrew their members in protest at the company's position, Mr. Pestronk said.

"They told me, 'If you don't make this project 100 percent union, we are going to do everything in our power to stop this job,'" Mr. Pestronk said in an interview. Picketing of the Goldtex site began in December 2011 and employees have been harassed and attacked in episodes that have been captured on video and posted on a company Web site, he said.

Michael Resnick, Philadelphia's director of public safety, said that if the authorities were presented with evidence that union protesters were committing crimes, the offenders would be arrested and charged, as they have been in "two or three cases" during the Post Brothers protest.

Mr. Resnick rejected accusations by Mr. Pestronk and others in the construction industry that city authorities are lax in cases involving union harassment and intimidation. He said unions had a constitutionally protected right to protest against working practices, and that developers like Post Brothers must recognize that.

"People have a right to express their views," Mr. Resnick said in an interview.

Meg Mitchell, clerk of Chestnut Hill Friends, said the contractor for the meeting house project was selected on the basis of price, quality and its track record of building houses of worship. She said the community, which like all Quakers advocates nonviolence, was aware that the winning contractor was not unionized.

The new meeting house is expected to open on schedule in early summer now that the damage has been repaired, Ms. Mitchell wrote in an e-mail.

Dispensing with diplomacy, he once loudly challenged a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor to "be a man" at a public meeting of the region's transit authority, and on another occasion gave the middle finger to a reporter in the rotunda of City Hall.

And on the morning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, acting on instinct, he raced into the streets of Lower Manhattan to direct traffic and, at day's end, delivered a copy of Winston Churchill's biography to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for inspiration.

In a city whose once raucous and colorful politics have become remarkably buttoned-down and tranquil over the past decade, Mr. Lhota, who filed documents to become a Republican candidate for mayor of New York City on Thursday morning, is something of a throwback: an unapologetically outsize personality, known throughout his career for big emotions and an uninhibited style.

His combination of experience — on Wall Street, in the Giuliani administration and, most recently, running the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — immediately changes the texture and character of a campaign dominated by Democratic elected officials.

But above all, Mr. Lhota's candidacy presents a question: is the New York City that elected Michael R. Bloomberg, a relatively measured, data-adoring technocrat, ready to embrace a hot-tempered, irreverent and unfiltered New Yorker, who as a deputy mayor, once paused in the middle of a closely watched legal deposition to quote Aristotle and playfully contemplate the derivation of the word "ejectment" – "a new word form, when I first heard it," he told his interrogators.

Advisers to Mr. Lhota argue that his candor and authenticity are his disarming charm, inevitably distinguishing him from a field made up of candidates they see as predictable political players.

"He can be very blunt with people without burning bridges," said Anthony Coles, a former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration who is not involved in the campaign.

But even his supporters acknowledge that Mr. Lhota's challenges are significant. Democrats have an overwhelming registration advantage in the city. For every registered Republican in the city, there are six Democrats, making it difficult for any Republican candidate to prevail.

Mr. Bloomberg, relying on $100 million of his own money for a lavish campaign, struggled to win re-election in 2009 against William C. Thompson Jr., the city's Democratic comptroller. Mr. Lhota, who is expected to participate in the city's campaign finance system, will be limited to spending about $13 million, the same as his rivals, through the primary and general election cycle.

Mr. Lhota, in a brief interview on Thursday morning, said city voters "have a history of electing mayors on issues, not party label. That is how Fiorello La Guardia was elected in the '40s, John Lindsey was elected in the '60s, Rudy Giuliani won in 1993, and Michael Bloomberg won in 2001."

He has described himself as a kind of cosmopolitan conservative, determined to hold down the city's spending and resist giveaways to public unions, even as he embraces same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

Mr. Lhota, who was born in the Bronx and grew up on Long Island, has a biography that seems ready made for a mayoral race: his father was a New York City police lieutenant, his grandfathers a New York City firefighter and a taxi driver.

After graduating from Georgetown University and Harvard Business School, he became a leader in the fast-growing Wall Street business of municipal finance.

Like many young conservatives frustrated by New York City problems with crime and homelessness in the 1980s, he was drawn to Mr. Giuliani's tough-talking message of reform.

Mr. Lhota began showing up for weekly tutorial sessions for Mr. Giuliani, then a United States attorney, on everything from homelessness to policing, that were quickly dubbed "mayor university." Mr. Lhota, by then an expert in municipal finance, focused on educating Mr. Giuliani on budget matters.

When Mr. Giuliani won election as mayor in 1993, he convinced Mr. Lhota to join him at City Hall as an assistant in the city's economic development office, where Mr. Lhota's rise was rapid, even by the standards of city government. By the second term, Mr. Lhota was deputy mayor for operations, overseeing three-fourths of the city's work force and standing in as mayor for Mr. Giuliani whenever he was out of town.

He was an influential figure in many of Mr. Giuliani's signature pushes – the privatization of city services, like sanitation, a huge reduction in the city's welfare rolls, and a hard-nosed style of budgeting that sought to deprive the City Council of dollars it had relied on for years.

Mr. Lhota, working with Mr. Giuliani, pushed for unusually drastic reductions in mainstays of the city budget, like funding for the arts, knowing well that members of the Council would demand their return. The resulting fury would be calmed by the return of basic funding, but often little else.

"Joe was the person who helped formulate that strategy," Mr. Giuliani said. "Joe knew the inner secret."

Within an administration known for relishing political combat, Mr. Lhota emerged as a figure with whom sometimes beleaguered outsiders could work.

Ronnie Eldridge, who represented the Upper West Side in the City Council from 1989 to 2001, said Mr. Lhota was an uncommon ally in a truculent City Hall — an administration, Ms. Eldridge recalled, that once halted construction on a capital project that she championed because her husband, the legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, criticized Mr. Giuliani's plans to overhaul Times Square.

"I had a terrible relationship with the Giuliani administration," she said in a telephone interview. "But not with Joe, ever. He was respectful, he was responsive and funny, and willing to at least give you the impression that he was agreeing with you."

After leaving City Hall at the end of the Giuliani term, Mr. Lhota returned to the corporate world, as a top executive at Cablevision and Madison Square Garden.

But he was quickly drawn back into government, taking the reins of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 2011 and becoming an unlikely cheerleader for an agency whose reputation for bloated spending is outshone only by the daily complaints of its riders.

After Hurricane Sandy, as other regional transit systems strained to return to normal, Mr. Lhota was widely praised for the subway's rapid recovery, hastened by a decision to shut down service entirely the day before the storm.

But Mr. Lhota also left the authority with a trail of unfinished business. Little progress was made on contract negotiations with Local 100, which has been working without a contract for a year. The storm threw into flux an already fragile budget plan, and many corners of the system — from the South Ferry station to the Rockaway shuttle in Queens — remain in shambles.

Some transit workers also resent what they perceive as Mr. Lhota's taking too much credit for the post-storm recovery. (Mr. Lhota did say earlier this week that "M.T.A. workers — union workers — deserve a lion's share of the credit.")

"The irony is, he didn't lift a finger to put the system back together," said John Samuelsen, Local 100's president. "He didn't settle the contract with us and now off the work that we did, he's trying to launch a mayoral candidacy."

Over the past year, Mr. Lhota has endeared himself to a wider audience with an active and frequently impolitic Twitter account, where he offers unguarded commentary on sports, politics and his own alcoholic consumption.

In his original Twitter profile, he described himself as a "9/11 cancer survivor," a subject he is not shy about discussing.

Shortly after he received a diagnosis of cancer in 2005 – the result, he believes, of prolonged exposure to the air around ground zero – Mr. Lhota shared the information with friends with characteristic defiance and humor.

Anticipating hair loss from chemotherapy, he asked for "ideas for temporary tattoos to slap on the side of my head."

He asked for prayers, but made clear that he had already turned to his old standby, Mr. Churchill, for words of comfort. "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never," he wrote, quoting his hero.

Mr. Lhota's cancer is in remission, and he said his doctors have cleared him for the rigors of a mayoral run.