Word: bombecks
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...Emerson Junior High in Dayton, Bombeck started writing a humor column for a school newspaper called The Owl. Says Bill Bombeck: "The format hasn't changed a lot. You're talking about someone who has been writing a personal column since she was twelve or 13 years old." Bombeck had been fairly offhanded about singing and dancing, but wising off in print was the best thing since soaping windows at Halloween. A couple of years later she was at it again, clowning about shoplifting, clearance sales and the lunch menu for the newsletter of Rike's department...
...pursuit of a college education took her through uncertain territory. Middle-class teenagers of the time went on to college from high school the way they went to the drive-in for frozen custard and French fries. Everyone enrolled somewhere, and no one thought much about it. But Bombeck was working class, the first person in her family's history even to graduate from high school. College was not seen as a necessity for many young women, or even as especially desirable. "Your goals were supposed to be modest," she recalls. "If you were a girl, you either...
Living at home and paying her own way, Bombeck made it through college in four years, including three sessions of summer school. The experience was not rich in what is usually thought of as college life, but she got the degree, and she did it on her own. In a second profound act of independence, she converted at 22 from the United Brethren Church to Roman Catholicism. "I saw something in it I wanted to have," she says. "There is something very soothing about the whole thing. A love of God is easier for me to accept than the fear...
...Dayton Herald took on a gifted but erratic recruit after Bombeck graduated from the university. As a reporter, she recalls, "I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order." Even with her shorthand, she says, "I could never get the knack of listening and taking notes at the same time." She would get excited and forget to write things down, and "everyone I interviewed ended up sounding like me. I did that with Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Eisenhower." The idea of Eleanor...
...everyone who has made the mad leap into parenthood knows, it is not the first child but the second whose arrival skews life into a grotesque caricature of its former civility. When Bombeck was several months pregnant with Andrew, the family moved to a tract development a few miles from Dayton that she was to satirize as "Suburbian Gems." Its real name is Centerville. The Bombecks lived on Cushwa Drive ("probably named for some dentist") in a house like all the others except for one prized interior feature, a $1,500 "two-way" fireplace, and on the outside, a front...