Erma in Bomburbia: Erma Bombeck

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self-caricature, the rhinoceroid slob in housecoat and curlers who hasn't seen her feet since grade school, is not even a fun-house mirror image of reality. She is a good-looking, brown-haired woman (though the hair color varies according to whim) who is, if not gaunt, at any rate acceptably trim at 5 ft. 2 in. and 127 Ibs. Is it a surprise that her daughter Betsy, 30, and her sons Andrew, 28, and Matthew, 25, have lost their baby teeth? And that her husband is not a football-stupefied turnip but rather an articulate, quick-minded fellow? Bill Bombeck retired in 1978 after a successful career as a school administrator, and now manages their income of $500,000 to $1 million a year. He is more likely to be found jogging than watching the tube, and four years ago he ran the Boston Marathon in the creditable time of 3 hr. 29 min. Not all of the one-line zappers come from her side of the table; Bill will breeze into the house and announce with a big smile that he has just been to the library and that all of her books were in. She replies that he looked like a dead fish after his last road race and that he had better slow down. "You don't understand," she says. "I'm too old to shop around. You're it." The strong affection between the two is evident.

There is a hint of where the columns come from when Bombeck is persuaded to talk about herself. "My life story?" she says. "Fifteen minutes top. You're looking at shallow. I'm just not that deep. You're looking at a bundle of insecurity. I always think that everything good is going to evaporate and disappear overnight. I am the quietest person at the party. I position myself at the chip dip and don't leave all night. I still have a very ordinary, simple person trapped in this rich, gorgeous, successful body." The joke is practiced and sure, but she does not want her listener to miss her point, so she spells it out. "The whole thrust of my existence is that I'm ordinary." It seems important to her to believe this. Another joking statement of the theme: "Everyone thinks of ordinary as some kind of skin disease." Then she quotes the sort of thing she says when she gives a commencement speech: "Most of you are going to be ordinary. You are not going to the moon. You'll be lucky to find the keys to your car in the back parking lot. But some of you are going to be great things to yourselves. You are going to be the best friend someone ever had . . ."

The 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 and her mother, 25-year-old Erma Fiste, shared a bedroom in her grandmother's house, and each day Mother Erma would get up at 5 a.m., fix breakfast for her daughter, see that she was dressed for school, and then leave in time to work the 7 a.m. shift at the Leland Electric factory. An adult observer would have seen a spunky young widow doing her best in bad