Word: daytons
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...journey that did not lead Bombeck to the moon began in Dayton, and the date could be set accurately enough as June 4, 1936. She was nine, and that was the day her father, a crane operator named Cassius Fiste, died of a heart attack at 42. "One day you were a family," she recalls, "living in a little house at the bottom of a hill. The next day it was all gone." The furniture, including Erma's bed and dresser, was immediately repossessed, and her half sister went off to live with her natural mother. Erma...
...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...
...young women, or even as especially desirable. "Your goals were supposed to be modest," she recalls. "If you were a girl, you either got a job and paid board, or you got married." She took typing and shorthand at a vocational school and worked as a copygirl at the Dayton Herald to meet expenses. (Bill Bombeck worked at the morning Journal...
...copy boy.) Erma saved enough money to begin courses at Ohio University, in Athens, but after a semester she was broke again. She returned to Dayton, got the department-store job and enrolled at the University of Dayton, the Roman Catholic school where Bill was a student...
...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...