Word: writes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...work are now plentiful: for one thing, she is the only female in a seditious cabal called the American Academy of Humor Columnists, whose other members are Art Buchwald, Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Gerald Nachman and Don Ross, and whose sole function is to give members an excuse to write insulting letters to one another. (She was admitted, says Buchwald, because she won a banana-bread bake-off with another woman and also promised to make coffee and clean up.) Her friends are admiring and loyal. "There is an awful lot under the hair curlers," says one of them, Columnist...
...than any of this is her rich, sure, rock-solid sense of inadequacy. No writer should be without it. Bombeck's brings her back to the typewriter, twitchy with remorse for the unspeakable sin of not measuring up, after only a few days of vacation. She writhes, and writes, and makes a rare sort of contact. "I swear to you, I don't write fiction," she says. Bill Bombeck and their endlessly libeled children swear she does. No matter; when the jokes splat on the page like strained spinach flung by somebody's centrifugal suburban baby, they...
...local radio station. Erma stayed on the program for nearly eight years, tap dancing and singing. "She was quite a little hoofer," says her mother, who still has Erma's signed song sheets for On the Good Ship Lollipop and I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Bombeck says it is obvious that the wrong Erma broke into show biz. When her mother, now a lively 73, began to appear with her on talk shows, Bombeck would tell the producers, "Don't worry about Mamma not talking. Worry about her taking over...
...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...
...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 Roosevelt sounding like Erma Bombeck clearly had its bizarre appeal, but before anything truly lunatic could come of it, Erma quit the paper for good...