George was journalist John Keasler, who wrote for papers like the St Louis Post-Dispatch (where he started the Dear George column, which is actually called By George!) before moving back to his home state, Florida, in 1960 and working for the Miami News (where he wrote over 7500 articles) until it became defunct in 1988. Keasler grew up in Plant City, Florida, and while he didn’t attend college himself he taught writing at the University of Miami. Along with By George he wrote more serious articles, covering John F Kennedy’s assassination and the Jonestown massacre, and more lighthearted pieces about life in Florida - in 1973 he was sent on a trip to rediscover Atlantis. In 1962 he was on the tv show To Tell the Truth (“Will the real ____ please stand up?”). Keasler passed away in 1992 in his hometown, Plant City. He had a wife, Margery, who also wrote for the Miami News (and was pretty funny herself!), and six children. He had at least two books published, one was a collection of By George columns and the other was a novel, Surrounded on Three Sides.