Word: erma
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...shows in her writing. Simple in style, mundane in subject matter, her thrice-weekly column for 200 newspapers (including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe) has a title that precisely conveys her puckish point of view. She calls it "At Wit's End." What most tickles Erma, a former women's news reporter for the Dayton Journal Herald, is her unfashionable fascination with being a housewife. Her beat, she once wrote, is the utility room...
...Onassis Knocks. It sounds dreary, but Erma can stir smiles with columns on how to handle a dirty oven ("If it won't catch fire today, clean it tomorrow"), hand-me-down clothes, daytime naps, gardening, sibling rivalry ("Who gets the fruit cocktail with the lone cherry on top?"), chewing gum, home barbering and the ids of March. "If a woman is ever to have an affair" a recent column began, "it will be in March. Psychologically, it is a perfect month. The bowling tournaments are over. The white sales on bedding are past. Your chest cold has stabilized...
...Erma's columns deal with such dreams of an everyday housewife, or even with easy big issues like abortion and the Pill. She mainly focuses on routine reality. Sample, on the perils of being without an ordinary pencil: "If Onassis knocked on the door and wanted to buy our house for a highway phone booth, I would have to sign the agreement with (a) an eyebrow pencil, (b) yellow crayon, (c) cotton swab saturated in shoe polish, (d) an eyedropper filled with cake coloring, or (e) a sharp fingernail dipped in my own blood...
...Erma has been called a champion of the Great Silent Majority. That upsets her. For one thing, she is a staunch Democrat. Worse, "it sounds like I'm totally uninvolved-like being a ski instructor in Berlin during World War II." She has been criticized for not championing the feminist revolution. That suits her fine. Most of the revolutionaries, she says, "are just like roller-derby dropouts, or Russian pole-vaulting types." The uncharacteristic club is quickly replaced by a tickling feather. She adds: "When I make speeches I'm always asked, 'Have you burned your...
...Erma rarely lectures and seldom ap pears on television. She spends most of her time on a 30-acre farm in Bellbrook, Ohio, a small town 10 miles south of Dayton. Besides her newspaper column (which was launched by the Dayton Journal Herald in 1965, is now syndicated by Publishers-Hall and last year earned her close to $50,000), she writes a monthly column for Good Housekeeping entitled "Up the Wall" and is working on her second book...