(5 of 10)
Living at home and paying her own way, Bombeck made it through college in four years, including three sessions of summer school. The experience was not rich in what is usually thought of as college life, but she got the degree, and she did it on her own. In a second profound act of independence, she converted at 22 from the United Brethren Church to Roman Catholicism. "I saw something in it I wanted to have," she says. "There is something very soothing about the whole thing. A love of God is easier for me to accept than the fear." She remains a believer, who says, quirkily, "I never laugh when I pray. That's God's turn." Like many Catholics, however, she is troubled by doctrinal issues affecting birth and reproduction. She agrees with the church prohibition of abortion but cannot accept strictures against birth control. "The group I ran with would have six, seven, eight kids and be drowning underneath. Let's face it, the earth cannot afford this Catholicism."
The Dayton Herald took on a gifted but erratic recruit after Bombeck graduated from the university. As a reporter, she recalls, "I was terrible at straight items. 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 in 1953. She and Bill, by then a struggling high school social studies and American history teacher, had been married four years, and, she says, "I was sick of working. Putting on pantyhose every morning is not just whoopee time. My dream was to putter around the house, learn how to snap beans, put up curtains and bake bread." The young couple adopted Betsy, and Erma, who had learned domesticity as a child, returned to the home, an event that was to prove only slightly less momentous than Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines.
As everyone who has made the mad leap into parenthood knows, it is not the first child but the second whose arrival skews life into a grotesque caricature of its former civility. When Bombeck was several months pregnant with Andrew, the family moved to a tract development a few miles from Dayton that she was to satirize as "Suburbian Gems." Its real name is Centerville. The Bombecks lived on Cushwa Drive ("probably named for some dentist") in a house like all the others except for one prized interior feature, a $1,500 "two-way" fireplace, and on the outside, a front door they painted red so that Mother Erma and Tom Harris could find them when they visited.
None of the residents of Centerville, least of all the Bombecks, thought they were doing anything hilarious as they mowed