TRT Mourns Flo Higgins, Skywatch Columnist

Flo Higgins

By Marion Lynch. 

It’s all in the timing.
That’s how Flo Higgins – astrologer, artist, newspaper-woman, teacher and business owner – sums up the meaning of astrology and the role it plays in her own life and the lives of her many devoted followers.
It was timing that her friend, TRT founder Claudia Ansorge, sought when she consulted Higgins about the best date to launch her new weekly paper. That date – September 25, 1990 – proved to be a fortuitous one and though the newspaper has gone through many changes, Flo Higgins has remained a constant presence on its pages.
“I haven’t missed one week,” she said, estimating that she’s written 1,275 Skywatch columns. One week – when Super Storm Sandy devastated much of the two rivers – Skywatch didn’t make it into print, but like the true newspaper woman she is, Higgins filed her column despite the weather.
Week after week for 25 years, readers of the TR T turn to the Skywatch column to see what’s in their stars. She advises readers when it’s time to make a move, meet new people, start a new endeavor, or – when the time is not right – when to wait. In addition to the horoscopes for each sun sign, readers turn to Skywatch to learn the birthdays of famous people and read a bit of astrological gossip about a celebrity or a person in the news.
Not surprising, since Higgins launched her writing career in gossip.
She was working as an artist, but with famed New York Evening News gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen as her idol, Higgins started her own column called “I’m A Snoop” for a small weekly in Warren Township. That led to a job as a reporter, and finally a 25-year stint as an editor of the paper, owned by the Recorder Publishing chain.
“My friend got involved in astrology, and she brought a big bunch of books to my house and said, ‘You’ve got to read all these books,’” she recalled. “So I did, and I got hooked.”
Astrology blended well with her career at the newspaper. “I was a born artist. I was a born astrologer. I was a born newspaper person,” she said.
She started using her knowledge of astrology to tell her friends what was going to happen and then taught astrology in adult school in Somerset County.
When she and her husband moved to Rumson in 1971, Higgins channeled all of her energy into art and astrology. She taught at the local adult schools, gave lectures on astrology, studied art and was an active member of the Guild of Creative Art and served as its secretary for eight years.
Her shop on River Road in Fair Haven, Aquarius Rising, had a very successful run for 20 years.
“People go to astrologers when they have a problem or want to know who they’re going to marry, things like that,” she said. “But a lot of very successful people come as a matter of timing. If you take a job at a certain time at a certain day, you’re going to be much more successful than if you take it on another day.
It’s this knowledge of timing that makes astrologers very wealthy on Wall Street, she said.
Today, in addition to writing her weekly Skywatch column, Higgins works with some clients, mostly by telephone. She writes daily and spends hours on the Internet, doing research for her website, flo-higgins.com, visited by more than a half-million people.
With every person – whether a client or a celebrity in the news – her approach is the same: a chart showing where the planets were on the date and time the person was born. That chart, she says, is the pathway to understanding.
It’s not just an understanding of what’s going to happen and when, she says, but “a pathway to the real you. To who you really are.”
Twenty-five years and 1,275 columns later, Higgins says that the Two River Times was born on the right day.
We can all thank the stars for that.