Jean Dixon, the Ageless Prophet

 

The Prophet Who Never Aged: Jean Dixon

 Unless you were a Washington, D.C. real estate agent, you had probably never heard of Jean Dixon before May 13, 1956.

That was when she was featured in the newspaper supplement Parade Magazine as “The Woman Who Predicts Events in Washington – Correctly.”

The headline touted that she had predicted the “President’s illness and the Kremlin shakeup.”

But the article, by Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson’s long-time assistant, and Fred Blumenthal, chronicled many more predictions by the “crystal-gazer.” Yes, Jean Dixon really did use a crystal ball.

They began with an illustration of her power of prescience from the previous summer:

Dixon was getting her hair done when she “suddenly slid out from under a hair dryer and dashed to a phone to call her real-estate office. ‘George,’ she told her assistant urgently, ‘get an ambulance and a doctor quickly. Mr. Mitchell is having a heart attack.’

“The call is stamped on George Miller's memory for life. ‘Mitchell, one of our salesmen, was sitting at a desk behind me,’ he explains. ‘He had just returned from vacation, and I had never seen him looking better. With the telephone still in my hand, I turned to look at him. As I did, he keeled over with a heart attack.’”

Dixon had predicted a colleague’s heart attack (!) just as she had previously predicted Winston Churchill's postwar election defeat and triumphant comeback, Eisenhower’s heart attack, even Native Dancer’s defeat in the 1953 Kentucky Derby (he went off as the prohibitive favorite at 3-5).

At least according to Anderson and Blumenthal.

For years after the Parade article she issued annual prognostications for the year ahead.

That’s what kept her in the public eye.

But what kept her in the newspapers was a daily astrology column that ran in hundreds of papers, including the Kingsport Times-News, from 1968 until March 30, 1997, two months and four days after her death, which she had not predicted.

And while she aged, her column picture remained the same. She was the Dorian Gray of the newspaper world.

When she died in 1997 the column announced her death at age 79. She was actually 93. But you couldn’t tell it from her picture.

She didn’t look a day over 64, which was her age when her column started and her column photo was taken.

That’s why I call her The Ageless Prophet.

Jean Dixon's 1967 column sig

Jean Dixon's 1980 column sig

Jean Dixon finally changed her column photo in 1985

That’s really not so unusual in the newspaper world. A columnist gets her or his picture taken for the column photo or “column sig” as it’s called in the newspaper world and then that same photo runs for years. And years.

Dear Abby looked youthful until 1974, almost 20 years after her column began, when she finally changed her column photo.

Dear Abby in 1957

Dear Abby in 1974

Dear Abby in 1996

But at least she did change her column sig photo every now and then, at least six times over the half century she wrote her column, by my count.  

From scanning old newspapers, it appears Jean Dixon changed her column sig once, in the early eighties.

Curious members of the public who attended her funeral must have wondered who the elderly lady was in the casket. It was the 93-year-old who had been posing as a 61-year-old for decades.

 

 

Jean Dixon’s 1956 Predictions:

“Vice President Richard Nixon she considers underestimated. The crystal ball "shows his shadow encircling the world." Of New York's ex-Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, she says flatly: "He will be assistant President in Ike's second term."

“On the world scene, 'Mrs. Dixon came up with this exclusive forecast for PARADE: “Prime Minister Nehru of India will not remain in power much longer. He will recede into the background and his policies will not prevail. One of two men will take over. Their names passed through the crystal quickly, but they appeared to be Deshmuki and Desra."

“Looking Farther Ahead Mrs. Dixon thinks Americans should be most concerned with the more distant future — specifically the 1960s, which the crystal shows as "years of upheaval at home and international eruptions abroad, but not necessarily war." She adds: “Russia will do some good things, but also some terrible things. Americans will have to rise personally, physically, mentally and spiritually to the challenge."

“As for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office “though not necessarily in his first term."

“Despite these clouds, she does see some brightness in the future. "Things will get better, much better, in the '70s." she says. “In that decade, we will really have peace."

 

 

Your Ever-Aging Author

Of course this is all an excuse to post my old column sigs, or at least the ones I can find. I wrote a column for somebody or other for 49 years. I can find nine different column sigs so I must have changed column photos on average every five or so years. In some cases I also changed newspapers. In addition I wrote a column for a few newspapers, including the New York Daily News that didn’t use column sigs.

New column photos usually happen because of a newspaper redesign. The word goes forth to all columnists to go by the photography department and get a new headshot

At one newspaper I worked at, another columnist, unhappy with the photo department results, went to Glamour Shots in the mall for a new column sig. I always went with the photo department. No glamour here.

 

1969 – My first column, ever. The college paper, The UT Daily Beacon, didn’t use column sigs, just a standing head: the name of the column, in my case Staten’s Static, and my byline. “Staten’s Static" was created by the editor who had never met me and didn’t know how to pronounce my last name.

 

1970 – I had been writing for the Beacon for a year when new editor Frank Gibson decided we all needed column sigs and he wanted sketches not photos. He handed the job of drawing the sigs to my roommate, Beacon cartoonist (and Kingsport native) Dan Pomeroy, who did a bang-up job.

I argued that since I had been a columnist for a year all my readers had a picture in their head of what I looked like. Why spoil it? Frank agreed. So in my column sig I got a paper bag over my head – you know, the old joke about a blind date. This paper bag gag was a good seven years before the comedian Murray Langston put a paper bag over his head and became the Unknown Comic, and decades before New Orleans Saints fans put paper bags over their heads in shame. (I should have trademarked the Paper Bag.)

This is still my favorite column sig, maybe because that was my sig when I first met my wife.

 1975 – In between my duties as an editor, I wrote an occasional column for the Kingsport Times-News during my first stint with the paper (1975-1976). I named the column “The Innocent Bystander.” (I still like that name for a column.) We didn’t use columnist photos so there was only the column name along with my byline.

But I was soon on my way north to the Dayton, Ohio Daily News and I turned over the column and the name to my friend Margy Clark who wrote the Innocent Bystander column for the next ten years (winning Best Humor Columnist in Tennessee three times).

 

1976 – The Dayton Daily News used drawings rather than photos for columnists. My column sig was based on a photo.

 

1978 – I headed south and west to the Louisville, Kentucky Times to be TV critic.

 

1981 – We must have had a redesign because I got a new column sig.

 

1986 – Gannett bought the Louisville Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal and folded the Times. In addition to a new owner I got a new column photo.

 

1988 – I left the Courier-Journal to become a free-lance writer. But I kept writing a weekly column. My change in status spawned yet another new column photo.

 

1995 - I don’t remember why I got a new column photo but I went with the glasses and sweater look. I have no idea why. I still have that sweater, somewhere.

 

2002 – I moved back to Kingsport and signed on as metro columnist at the Kingsport Times-News. I still have this shirt, too. I decided to go back to Smiling Vince after seven years as Serious Vince.

 

2006 – I actually initiated this column photo change. I had just lost 20 pounds and thought I should have a more accurate, and Thinner Vince, sig.   

As a columnist you go back and forth on whether you want people to be able to identify you from that postage stamp photo. On the one hand you do because you pick up a lot of column ideas from people you meet in restaurants and stores. On the other hand there are times when you need a haircut or a shave or even a bath and you’d just as soon not be recognized.

I’ve always been amazed that anyone could identify me from my little photo. People would say “You’re taller than your picture in the paper.” And I would reply, “I’ve grown.”

From these column sigs you can see that I’ve also grown older.

Unlike Jean Dixon.