NEW YORK – Two men had recently bought a house together in San Francisco, and the neighbors were annoyed. The men were entertaining “a very suspicious mixture of people,” the neighbors wrote, asking: “How can we improve the neighborhood?”

“You could move,” Dear Abby replied.

That zinger, contained in the 1981 collection “The Best of Dear Abby,” was such classic Abby – real name, Pauline Friedman Phillips – that it moved her daughter to burst into laughter Thursday when reminded of it, even though she had just returned from the funeral of her mother. The elder Phillips had died a day earlier at age 94 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.