Erma Bombeck

Erma Louise Bombeck, born Erma Fiste on February 21, 1927, in Bellbrook, Ohio, became one of the most widely read American humorists of the late twentieth century. Raised in Dayton in a working-class family, she grew up in the years before and during World War II, then found her subject in the postwar suburbs. From 1965 until five days before her death on April 22, 1996, her syndicated newspaper column described the ordinary life of a Midwestern suburban housewife with broad, sometimes eloquent humor.

Her eye for comedy was formed early. Bombeck was an excellent student, an avid reader, and especially fond of the popular humor writers of her time. After her father, Cassius Edwin Fiste, died in 1936, she moved with her mother into her grandmother’s home. She practiced tap dance and singing and worked for a local radio station in a children’s revue for eight years. At Emerson Junior High School she wrote a humorous column for the school paper, and at Parker Vocational High School she wrote a serious column with bits of humor mixed in.

Bombeck’s first steps in journalism came in Dayton. In 1942 she worked at the Dayton Herald as a copygirl, and in 1944 her interview with Shirley Temple became a newspaper feature. She later enrolled at Ohio University, but left after one semester when her money ran out. At the University of Dayton, she worked several jobs while writing humorous material for a department store newsletter and contributing to the student publication. Her English professor, Bro. Tom Price, told her she had great prospects as a writer. She graduated in 1949 with a degree in English, converted to Catholicism, and married Bill Bombeck, a former fellow student who later became an educator and school supervisor.

Family life became both her daily work and her richest material. After doctors told the Bombecks that having a child was improbable, they adopted their daughter, Betsy, in 1953. Bombeck chose to become a full-time housewife, though she still wrote humorous columns for the Dayton Shopping News in 1954. She later gave birth to two sons, Andrew in 1956 and Matthew in 1958. In 1959 the family moved to Centerville, Ohio, into a tract housing development. There, the routines and frustrations of home life became the world she would turn into comedy.

In 1964 Bombeck resumed regular writing for the local Kettering-Oakwood Times, earning $3 a column and writing in her small bedroom. The next year the Dayton Journal Herald asked for two weekly humor columns, and after only three weeks her work went into national syndication under the title “At Wit’s End.” By 1969, five hundred U.S. newspapers carried the column; by 1978, nine hundred did. By the 1970s, her columns were being read semi-weekly by 30 million readers in the United States and Canada. Her 1967 book At Wit’s End gathered her columns, and later books included The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank in 1976, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, and Aunt Erma’s Cope Book in 1979. Fifteen books of her humor were published, most of them bestsellers.

Bombeck also became a familiar voice beyond print. She lectured in cities where her columns appeared, was a regular guest on Arthur Godfrey’s radio show, and appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America from 1975 to 1986, offering brief commentaries, gag segments, and serious interviews. Her television sitcom attempts, including Maggie in 1981, did not last, but her newspaper voice had already done what mattered most: it made domestic life funny without making it small. She wrote about middle-class America after World War II from the inside, with impatience, affection, and a sharp sense of the absurd. That is why her words still feel close to readers who know that ordinary days can be both ridiculous and worth keeping.