Dear Ann Landers,
ecently a dearly loved, much-admired and re-spected man died. He was an ideal husband and father, a community leader, financially successful and the sort of person everyone looked up to. After his death, his wife and adult chil-dren went through his personal belong-ings-together. What they found was shattering and heartbreaking. They dis-covered a collection of pornographic magazines and books, stacks of ob-scene pictures and a suitcase filled with stag movies. The family is crushed. They now feel his life was a sham-that he was a hypocrite. No one can understand it. How could a person have kept his true character so completely hidden from those who were so close to him? A prurient interest in sex is as unlike this man as night is from day. Please ex-plain. STUNNED IN CONNECT-ICUT

DEAR STUNNED,
It is not unusual for a person to have a private, kooky compartment in his life-ranging from the slightly offbeat to the wildly bi-zarre. This needn't mean the person was evil or sinister. It merely means that, in THIS particular area, he had strudel in his noodle. SHE SHOULD HAVE KEPT HER HOT HANDS OFF DEAR READERS: Pass the humble pie, or the crow, or whatever you want to call it. Ann Landers has her fork ready. There's nothing like 54,000,000 daily readers to keep a girl on her toes. Every now and then I reverse my advice, usually because the readers have persuaded me I was wrong. And so it was in the case of the mother who found a collection of nude pictures in a box under her son's bed. She wrote to say she had cured her 17-year-old son by pasting the nudes on the living room wall and shaming him. "That," she crowed, "ended his career as an art collector." I thought it was ingenious and amus-ing, and I said so. Hundreds of readers let me know it wasn't funny. Hundreds more said it was a destructive thing to do to a 17-year-old boy. They said the lad's behavior was normal, and Mom should have kept her hot little hands off the pictures and said nothing. The following letter is a fairly repre-sentative example of what made me change my advice.