Erma in Bomburbia: Erma Bombeck

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their lawns and carted their kids to Cub Scout meetings. Bill tinkered around the house, and pieced out his teacher's salary by painting houses and working at the post office on school vacations. Erma, he says, was always repainting or redecorating, moving the furniture around. There was, of course, a septic tank, and in the summer, says Erma, "you could see that little sucker sink into the ground and you'd think, 'There goes another $400.' " But there weren't many one-liners: "Who was there to listen?"

By an odd chance, the family in the house across the street was that of a young radio broadcaster, Phil Donahue, with five growing children. Donahue, an old friend now, whose morning TV appearances bring housework to a halt across the country, confirms that Bombeck was by no means the neighborhood clown. She and Bill, he says, were among the most hardworking of the development's house-proud do-it-yourselfers. All the houses had Early American furniture, including the inevitable rocker with a cushion tied to the back. The idea of Bombeck as a hopelessly disorganized housewife "is, at the very least, highly exaggerated. When you went to Erma's place, you never had to step over dirty underwear. At least in the evenings."

The pressure that was to fizz through the crazy columns was building, however. Listen to Bombeck, who wanted to give her kids the secure childhood she had missed: "I was overwhelmed. You get from your mother what things should be. I'm killing myself. We all did. Are you ready for this? I'm sitting there at midnight bending a coat hanger, putting nose tissue on it to make a Christmas wreath for the door. You know what it looks like? It looks like a coat hanger with tissue that is going to melt when it rains. It's a desperation you cannot imagine. I had a husband who worked at his job until 7 and 8 p.m. taking care of other people's children. That's when I remember reading Jean Kerr, who would sit out in her car and hide, reading the car-manual section on tire pressure. It's ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous." Then a deep breath: "It's the core of laughter. If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

Laughter: "If Mary had lived on our block, we would have said, 'Of course she has time to go to the dentist. She only has Jesus.' "

Making it better, sort of: "It is not as good as anyone, including your mother, promised it would be. It is also as good as it is ever going to get. And no matter what you do, no one is ever going to thank you."

Why, in the early '60s, she began writing columns: "I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair." This archetypal wisecrack is, after her heartfelt growl about the overmeticulous neighbor who waxes her driveway, probably the best known of Bombeck's nifties. It has a dead-on, chisel-it-on-my-tombstone truthfulness. But for the moment, no one paid much attention to her capering. She did a column a week, at $3 each, for the Kettering-Oakwood Times, a suburban weekly. Her desk was a piece of plywood supported by cinder blocks in the Bombeck bedroom. Her participation in the stately procession of English literature stopped before the family came home, and the shoe-leather minute steaks and ketchup