Word: bombeck
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...chance, the family in the house across the street was that of a young radio broadcaster, Phil Donahue, with five growing children. Donahue, an old friend now, whose morning TV appearances bring housework to a halt across the country, confirms that Bombeck was by no means the neighborhood clown. She and Bill, he says, were among the most hardworking of the development's house-proud do-it-yourselfers. All the houses had Early American furniture, including the inevitable rocker with a cushion tied to the back. The idea of Bombeck as a hopelessly disorganized housewife "is, at the very...
...early '60s, she began writing columns: "I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair." This archetypal wisecrack is, after her heartfelt growl about the overmeticulous neighbor who waxes her driveway, probably the best known of Bombeck's nifties. It has a dead-on, chisel-it-on-my-tombstone truthfulness. But for the moment, no one paid much attention to her capering. She did a column a week, at $3 each, for the Kettering-Oakwood Times, a suburban weekly. Her desk was a piece of plywood supported...
...pressure that was to fizz through the crazy columns was building, however. Listen to Bombeck, who wanted to give her kids the secure childhood she had missed: "I was overwhelmed. You get from your mother what things should be. I'm killing myself. We all did. Are you ready for this? I'm sitting there at midnight bending a coat hanger, putting nose tissue on it to make a Christmas wreath for the door. You know what it looks like? It looks like a coat hanger with tissue that is going to melt when it rains...
...always hit the table on time. "Mom never missed a dinner because of a deadline," Son Andrew says now. Given Bombeck's feelings about the enterprise-"Why take pride in cooking it, when they don't take pride in eating it?"-this is high tribute...
...Bombeck turned out zingers in the wilderness, earned her $3 a week and tried not to spend it all in one place. Then in 1965 things began to move fast. The merged Dayton Journal Herald offered her a twice-a-week column, and only three weeks later, the Newsday syndicate took her up. The phrase is exact; in journalistic terms, syndication is equivalent to ascending to heaven on a pillar of cloud. By the end of her first year, she had 36 papers, including Newsday, the Denver Post, the Minneapolis Star and the Atlanta Constitution. She began to be recognized...