Erma

Having finished the "Weirdo Writers" series, I'm moving on with a new one: posts based on how I used the Dewey Decimal system at the Indianapolis Public Library to find books by writers who could serve as mentors. First, how I got there. . .


Back in the day, if women had done name traditions the way men did, she'd have been Erma Jr. or Erma II as her mother was also an Erma. As a child, Erma was like one of those children's book heroines who have to go live with relatives and then move back in with their own families, only to have the storms of life disrupt everything again. For some time, Erma lived with the elder daughter from her father's first marriage, and then after her father's death, young Erma and elder Erma both went to live with elder Erma's mother. Then Erma Senior married again, and there were even more changes. 

Erma tried a semester or two of college, ran out of money and focus, then found jobs to keep her bills paid. She worked at Dayton's largest department store, Rike's.

Erma worked other jobs too -- the usual female options: secretary, receptionist, accountant in a medical office. She tried to break into journalism by becoming an excellent copy-girl, with mixdd results. She did finally get some work writing and editing. (She once interviewed Shirley Temple, who was paying a visit to Dayton.) On the side, Erma wrote advertising copy and anything else which paid a little something. 

Erma soon saw that hard work wouldn't do it. Without a college education, she'd get nowhere. She started fresh at the University of Dayton, and this time she made it through and got her degree, along with praise for her writing skills. During her undergraduate studies, she'd met Bill Bombeck, and after he finished military duty in Korea and his own college degree program, Erma married him. 

Erma and Bill adopted a daughter because Erma had been diagnosed with kidney issues and the doctors weren't sure about pregnancy. But Erma and Bill ended up having two more children, both sons. 

And Erma, who'd gone to school a year ahead of other children, learned to read instantly, and who'd written for school magazines and then  written newspaper articles and ad copy -- and who longed to write more -- was losing her mind with the housewife schtick. 

With Bill ( a teacher and school principal) acting as his wife's cheerleader, Erma used their smallest bedroom as an office. She balanced her typewriter on a board set over some cinder blocks, and she wrote short humor pieces for a weekly bargain paper called The Dayton Shopping News. You can see a page from that long-gone newspaper in this photo, above the ad for the store where Erma used to work. 

From there, Erma submitted more humor pieces to the local newspaper -- a daily-- and she got three bucks a pop for each. Her editor sent out some samples to a syndicate, and over time, Erma's "At Wits' End" column went out further and further into the world. 

So did Erma and Bill, who packed up the stuff from their small house and they moved to a suburban tract house in Centerville, Ohio. Centerville is north of Cincinnati, and neighbor Phil Donoghue reported that every house, which had the same layout, was "done in Early American." Plenty of material for Erma's humor, without every leaving the cul-de-sac. 

All told, Erma wrote four thousand "At Wits' End" columns, which were printed in nine hundred newspapers,giving Erma a readership of thirty million people. The columns were gathered into more than a dozen books, most of them bestsellers. 

I doubt, when Erma was trying to manage children, cleaning, cooking -- plus her marriage, while also tapping out paragraphs on a "desk" made from a board, that she'd ever be on the cover of TIME magazine. 

Or that there would be this one-woman show about her. Or this one. Or that, long after she and her family had left Ohio for Arizona, the city of Dayton, where she'd grown up, would continue regular celebrations of her and her work, as in this newspaper article.

The internet being what it is, there's many an Erma-themed blog (like this one) which feature not only her funniest essays, but celebrations of her life. This includes appreciation for the considerable effort she put in, during the 1970s,  into trying to make the Equal Rights Amendment happen. The now-bestselling author had not forgotten that her widowed mother had to move herself and her daughter in with her own mother, or what kinds of work she herself, as a single woman, had had to do for very little pay and zero appreciation. 

When I was a teenager in the early 70s, all I knew about Erma Bombeck was that she wrote the "At Wits End" column, which appeared in Indianapolis' (long-defunct) afternoon newspaper, the News.  But when my high school public -speaking teacher, who sponsored the school speech team, told me that I was funny like Erma Bombeck, I decided to find out what humor essays were and how to write them. 

I'd always had a library card, but all my reading had been in the children's section and we were limited to six books per visit. Our school had a library or my brain would have starved to death for lack of reading material.  My father was an engineer and interested only in technical manuals. My mother was dyslexic, with many farm-life interruptions during her one-room schoolhouse learning, which ended after eighth grade. My middle sister was also dyslexic and hated both reading and school, and my youngest sister's health issues kept her out of school. So I was the only person in my house who could read and/or who liked to read. Therefore we had no books except some sets of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, used as fillers for a hallway bookcase. 

I was fortunate enough to live just inside the boundary for a "central" school, for which the sprawl of Indianapolis was raked for students, who were hauled by lengthy bus rides to one giant high school. This meant that I rubbed shoulders with students from outside my slummy neighborhood. The better-off kids were also from factory life, but their parents were supervisors at the appliance and automobile plants, and the moms and dads could pay enough tax to give the next generation the chance at more than a basic education. At that time, Indiana had no property tax so you can imagine what the public schools were like. If you knew yor alphabet, how to add and subtract, And tha Communism was bad and laissez-faire capitalism was good, you were considered educated enough for a Hoosier. 

Even at the "good" school, I had a lot of study-hall time, which was a nice dodge for the school system to keep from paying a teacher for each of those blank hours. A girl from the class ahead of mine came to one of my study halls to recruit people for the speech team and I joined, figuring it was better than an hour of nothing. Then I took a class with the teacher who sponsored the team, and she was the person who said my writing reminded her of Erma Bombeck's.

And from there, I began to take the randomly-dangerous Indiana Avenue city bus -- the occasional brick came flying in through the glass windows and one had to duck and then finish the trip showered in jagged glass fragments -- downtown to go to the big public library so I could find more humor essays upon which to model my own work. 

And so it all began for me. Thanks, Erma. Here's a blog post from a writer who, in her aspirational days, kept sending Erma fan letters -- Erma of course kept writing back with encouraging responses. And speaking of encouragement, Erma compiled a book based on her visits to children in hospital cancer wards, and what the kids told her. 

There are any number of collections of Erma's work.

Next week: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Dewey Decimal System.

Garbo