Word: humorists
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Funny, but Correspondent William McWhirter was a little nervous about doing a series of extensive interviews with Humorist Erma Bombeck for this week's cover story. After 20 years with TIME, the past three as Caribbean bureau chief covering such subjects as Central American revolutions and the Miami cocaine epidemic, McWhirter at first approached the assignment more as a fringe benefit than a job. Then he began to worry whether he was quite ready for a warm, wisecracking columnist whose chief concerns are the household gods. Says he: "Some journalists are fond of saying that the nice guys...
...honest," says Bombeck (for it is indeed she, the syndicated star humorist of 900 papers in the U.S. and Canada, and the baggy-toreador-pants clown of ABC'S Good Morning America), "when I started, I thought I was squirrelly. I thought it was just me. After the first columns, everyone on the block confessed it was them too." Those early columns, written in Centerville, Ohio, back in the early '60s, were not quite Corinthian, but they sure were Ermaic. Their message was that housework, if it is done right, can kill you. It was that the women...
...given the opinion columns the same grace and punch he gave the paper's Washington bureau, and Washington Reporters Tom Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie are highly respected. Baseball Writer Peter Gammons may be that sport's most influential daily chronicler. Among other assets: Columnist Ellen Goodman, Humorist Diane White, Music Critic Richard Dyer and Editorial Writer Kirk Scharfenberg...
...talent is still the Times's most enviable asset. Its prestige enables it to lure star writers from other papers to routine assignments, from which they must fight to get stories into print. Times columnists and critics automatically become figures of national prominence. Among the best are Humorist Russell Baker, Political Commentator William Safire, Drama Critic Frank Rich and Architecture Critic Paul Goldberger. But the paper's political coverage lags behind the Washington Post's, and its business and sports sections are both weak when compared with those at other major papers. But even with these limitations...
...developed and did not sacrifice his humanism, decency, and commitment to freedom. White's character and achievement must be weighed against the sickness to which his sensitivity exposed him and against the shrillness of those who could accept him only by condescending to him as a humorist. What American letters might have lost in a novelist it gained in an essayist; and what culture might have missed in a hero it found in a sensible, if limited...