Erma in Bomburbia: Erma Bombeck

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times, but not until years later did Erma think of her mother's tough-minded energy as wise or heroic. What she felt at the time was a daily desertion. When her mother married a moving-van operator, Albert ("Tom") Harris, two years later, Erma gave him the classic drop-dead greeting: "If you think you're going to take my father's place, you're crazy." His attitude, she says, was "This kid needs sitting on." Eventually Erma and Tom made their adjustment. The incredible self-centeredness of children, normal and natural but often savagely cruel, has been a consistent theme in her humor.

When her daughter showed signs of shyness and loneliness, Mother Erma signed her up for tap-dancing lessons as therapy, then took her to an audition for a Kiddie Revue at a 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 the show."

Which is exactly what she does. Mother Erma, who lives with her husband in nearby Sun City, admits that she "never had a sense of humor growing up. But as I get older, I get crazier. Me and Erma are both sort of silly together. The humor helped us to get closer. We began to see life as it is and not take it so seriously."

At 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 store, where she worked to pay college expenses. "You can't imagine how it fractured those people," she says now. "I knew exactly what I wanted to do. God, I wanted to write. That's all I wanted to do. I really loved the exaggeration. I still write about passing my varicose veins off as textured stockings."

Her pursuit of a college education took her through uncertain territory. Middle-class teenagers of the time went on to college from high school the way they went to the drive-in for frozen custard and French fries. Everyone enrolled somewhere, and no one thought much about it. But Bombeck was working class, the first person in her family's history even to graduate from high school. College was not seen as a necessity for many young women, or even as especially desirable. "Your goals were supposed to be modest," she recalls. "If you were a girl, you either got a job and paid board, or you got married." She took typing and shorthand at a vocational school and worked as a copygirl at the Dayton Herald to meet expenses. (Bill Bombeck worked at the morning Journal as a