“It’s really hard for me to keep from calling them ‘my boys,'” contributing editor Prudence Mackintosh says. “I certainly don’t call them men most of the time.” But men are exactly what Jack, Drew, and William Mackintosh are. During the seventies and into the eighties, Prudence wrote numerous times for us about her life as a mom in the Highland Park neighborhood of Dallas, which required her to reveal the most intimate details of her children’s lives to hundreds of thousands of people across the state—which one’s nails grew “like a Japanese emperor’s,” which one’s hamster “ate his own doo-doo,” and the like. Incredibly, the three brothers are still speaking to their mother all these years later, and they’ve turned out just fine. (“Everybody got out of college,” Prudence says. “Thank God nobody is in rehab.”) Jack, 31, lives in New York City, where he works on the treasury services desk at investment banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman. Drew, 29, is an institutional equity salesman for another investment firm, UBS Warburg, in Dallas. William, 24, is also in Dallas, working in the marketing department of Wilson and Associates, an interior design and architectural firm. As weird as it was to grow up under a microscope—”People would always recite stories they’d heard about us, looking for a yea or nay,” Jack says—it was weirder for Prudence, whose advice and counsel is still in demand long after her last column: “I had a letter just the other day from a woman who is raising her grandchildren. She says she needs me!”
