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Fixit Is Fine STEVE CHIANI E Miss Fixit is the sweetheart, mother confessor, and arbitrator of the Army, Navy, and Marines. For the past few years—four to be exact—she has been breezing her way into their hearts and minds through her popular question-and-answer column that appears daily in The Honolulu Advertiser. This blonde dynamo, all of five-feet-three inches, has tenaciously clung to her sense of humor in spite of the tons of letters, some serious —some nonsensical—that come her way. “I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea,” she said, as she pointed a red-tipped finger at the assorted reference books that are piled high on her desk. “I am not an adult quiz kid. All of my information comes out of sources like these, or from the library. And once in a while Hoibert pitches in with an answer or two.” Since she has caught the fancy of the public, she has lost twelve pounds from staying up nights doing research. Now that she has an assistant, a cute trick named Patsi, the researching has lost some of its gigantic proportions and Fixit’s trim 105 pounds stays put. All branches of the service have apparently adopted her, and judging from the contents of her columns, she also enjoys a wide reputation among civilians as a sort of oracle. Miss Fixit—or Ilona Bensczko Selle, as her friends know her—left her native Austria when she was five to live with an older married sister who was settled in Birmingham, Ala. She is the youngest member of a family of eighteen. Her first job was that of secretary to a medical director of an Insurance Company in Birmingham. Getting tired of routine work, and having cherished the desire to try her luck in Hollywood , she upped and headed west, after a short fling at her secretarial job. This was in 1931. Trying to break into the movies wasn’t as easy as she had thought, and so she moved north to Seattle, Wash., 245 First published April 1945. where she lived for three years. Little did she realize when she left Hollywood totally disillusioned that one day her fan mail would top that of some of the current screen stars. In 1937, her wanderlust took her to Shanghai where she became the fashion editor of the Yankee Clipper magazine and wrote fashion hints under the pen name of Alycia. Realizing that the Japs had little or no sympathy for the latest notes on what milady should wear, she got out when they took Shanghai and came on to Honolulu to live in 1939. It wasn’t very long before Ilona, or Alycia, got herself on the staff of the editorial department of the Advertiser, doing all sorts of odd jobs. Her golden hair, haloed in a braid that is worn coronet style, acted as a beacon—for she was constantly interrupted at her desk by streams of servicemen that would walk into the office and head straight for her, to ask all sorts of questions.These interruptions gave her the idea for the column, and after getting the “go” sign from Ray Coll, Sr.—the Boss—her first column, which was called “What, When or Where,” made its appearance. It was only a matter of months until the response grew to such proportions that the Boss decided to play it up. The column was then changed to “Miss Fixit Answers”—and that’s what she has been doing since March 1941. Today she receives an average of a hundred letters a day and has had fifty proposals of marriage to date. One Army sergeant wanted to take her back to his Texas ranch as his bride, and “I can’t even ride a horse,” smiled Fixit. Her mail contains questions from men in nearly every theater of operations in the world. Many of the men who used to read her here have been moved on to one fighting front or another. She also gets mail from the families and relatives of the G.I.s, with requests from them to arrange a birthday party for their son, nephew, or cousin. This keeps Fixit plenty busy, for she arranges at least one birthday party a week, besides taking care of her thousand-and-one other chores. But she thrives on the thought that she has helped assure a lonely serviceman that his folks back home have not forgotten him. She...

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