Erma Bombeck Biography

Early Childhood
Erma Louise Fiste was born on February 21,1927. With her parents and half-sister Thelma, Erma lived on Hedges Street in a Dayton, Ohio, neighborhood filled with hardworking, lower middle class families. Her dad, a crane operator for the city of Dayton, couldn't offer the family many extras, but Erma never remembered feeling poor. There was always food on the table, serviceable clothing, and enough money squeezed out each month to pay for tap dancing lessons.

Even when they weren't dancing, Erma and Thelma were a team. Erma idolized her sister, who was seven years older. On weekends when Thelma visited her natural mother, Erma would sit, chin in hands, on the front steps of the house for hours, peering up and down the street, eagerly awaiting her big sister's return.
At the age of five, Erma ached to attend school. With Thelma away all day, Erma was bored. Although children generally did not begin first grade until they were six, Erma's eagerness along with her mother's certainty that she was ready, convinced the principal to admit her. She couldn't yet read, but Erma had already fallen in love with books. She raced around the house, collecting all the volumes she could find and toted them off to school.
Erma was an eager student and, at least until difficulties surfaced in college, an excellent one. Reading opened up life to her and helped her cope with the world of adults in which she found herself. When the school day ended, she would rush home, grab a book and scramble to her special spot under the eaves where it was cool. She would read out loud taking all the parts as though she were in a play. At Christmas, while her friends begged for dolls and bikes, she pleaded for books.
Erma wanted to make up stories and write for the school newspaper. English became the only subject she cared about. Every other period in the school day became just another hour to get through. She longed to travel and experience life beyond Dayton. And even at the age of 10, she wanted to write about it.

Growing Up
At school, Erma played the bookworm. Class clown? Definitely not. But if anyone had cared to search beneath the surface, they would have discovered a child fascinated by humor. Erma practically inhaled the works of popular humorists including Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and H. Allen Smith. So it's not surprising that when given the opportunity to write for the school newspaper, she produced a humor column.
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The staff of Emerson Junior High allowed the newspaper, The Owl, to carry Erma's work even though it was biting and sometimes even cruel. With those first columns, Erma discovered the power of words. Praise from teachers and students fueled her desire to poke fun at the world.
When she moved on to Patterson Vocational High School, Erma crammed school, social and academic news into her own column. It was basically serious stuff, but she always managed to fit in at least one amusing tidbit like this: "In sociology class, it is discovered that there is no teacher worse than your fellow students. The sisters [teaching nuns] have given over the class to the students...Results: If you have a blank look on your face, you're a dead ringer to be called upon."
One day when she was fifteen, Erma walked into the office of the managing editor of the Dayton Herald, the city's afternoon newspaper and said, "I want to work for your paper." The editor explained that only a full-time position was available.
"That's okay, I can work two weeks and get you another girl to work the two weeks I'm in school. While she's in school, I'll work. That's how our school operates. It'll be just like having a full-time person," Erma ended triumphantly. She was hired.
She proudly wore the title "copygirl," but Erma wrote for the newspaper only once during high school. Shirley Temple came to Dayton for the premiere of her latest movie, Since You Went Away. Erma interviewed her as one sixteen-year-old to another and the story was published on the feature page. Erma received the newspaper staff award for feature of the week -- $10 and a spot on the bulletin board. That day, she assured herself, marked the beginning of a great career.
Bill Bombeck worked for the city's morning paper, the Dayton Journal. When copygirl met copyboy, sparks flew, at least for Erma. Erma thought he was gorgeous. She didn't care if he couldn't put two words together and come up with a sentence. She eyed him for two or three years before they got together. Then, after only a couple of dates, he left for the Army and Korea.

The College Years
Graduating from high school in 1944 and determined to build a college fund, Erma assumed two full-time jobs. After three years as a copygirl, the Dayton Journal-Herald (the two papers had merged) hired her as a full-time writer. The job relieved her of the menial labor she had been performing, but there was little opportunity to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. She spent most of the stint writing obituaries.
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After a year of working night and day, her savings account held enough to launch her college career. Although she could have stayed in Dayton, she chose instead to begin experiencing life on her own at Ohio University in Athens, 137 miles from home.
Although Erma had more real-world working experience than most people her age, the first semester of college proved a disaster. In high school, her writing had been praised. She had been told she could write, yet she barely passed first semester freshman composition at the university. Hoping to work for the school newspaper, which enjoyed an excellent reputation, she submitted several articles that were all rejected.
Erma wondered, "If I can't write, what am I going to do with my life?" She felt defeated. For the first time in her life, her naturally sunny nature took a vacation. For most students, college marks the best years of their lives. For Erma, it meant little but struggle.
Fueled by an intense desire to prove herself, Erma enrolled at the University of Dayton, a private, medium-sized four-year Catholic college. She continued to struggle financially, but found a writing outlet when she tackled a job with Rike's department store, where she joked about clearance sales, the lunch menu and even shoplifting in their employee newsletter.
During her sophomore year at Dayton, Erma finally found someone who believed in her talent and restored some of her shattered self-confidence. Brother Tom Price had read some articles she had produced for the school newspaper and asked her to write for the university's magazine, The Exponent. At night, when she returned from work, she'd sit at the typewriter and crank out the copy. Psychology and philosophy courses expanded her understanding of the people she observed and gave her writing more depth and sensitivity.
One day, after reading one of her articles, Brother Tom Price turned to Erma and said the three words that would sustain her for the rest of her career. "You can write," he said, "you can write."
Erma graduated from the University of Dayton in 1949.

A Typical Fifties Housewife
More educated now than any previous member of her family had ever been, Erma willingly abandoned academic life and dove back into the newspaper business. The Dayton Journal-Herald welcomed her home. She was assigned to the women's section.
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Women's departments were a bit of a joke and no one was more aware of it than the women themselves. While there were a few women on the city side, for the most part, female reporters' stories rarely made the front page. The unfair treatment frustrated Erma, but she rarely complained.
She hoped some day to be promoted to the city side, but there was no rush. If she gave her best to every assignment, no matter how dull or silly she found the subject, she assumed that eventually she'd earn a move across the hall.
While her work turned out to have some negatives, her love life had taken a decided turn for the better. After Bill Bombeck left for Korea during the final stages of World War II, the two corresponded. Erma's letters impressed Bill. When he returned to Dayton, they began dating seriously. Erma and Bill, both age twenty-two, were married at the Church of the Resurrection on an overcast morning in August.
Erma returned to writing humor in 1952. At first her columns, which ran under the title "Operation Dustrag," offered household hints and new product evaluations. Then newlywed Erma discovered housework. Household absurdities quickly found their way into the column.
The newspapers' editors viewed her work skeptically. No one was certain that purposefully amusing writing belonged in the paper. Besides, in those days, no one attacked homemaking in the newspaper or anywhere else. A clean home and cleaner children gave a woman status.
At the same time, World War II had created a profound change for American women. With their men at war, millions of women flooded the workplace -- 75 percent of them were married and one-third had children under the age of 14. Erma's first columns struck a nerve with these women.
For two years, Erma and Bill tried to have a baby. Their doctor confirmed that chances of Erma's conceiving were small and they decided to adopt. After filling out boxes full of forms, they waited. Finally, Erma received a call from a Catholic Services social worker. She was about to become a mother. When Betsy came into her life, Erma said goodbye to her career and the people she had grown up with at the newspaper without the slightest doubt that she was doing the right thing.
The demands of motherhood amazed Erma. Exhaustion stalked her constantly. There weren't enough hours in the day. She never had time for herself and sagged under a kind of loneliness she had never known. Since no one discussed these feelings in public, Erma thought something was wrong with her, that she was the only woman in the world experiencing them. She thought she should be able to handle her life, but she wasn't doing a very good job and no one seemed to understand.
Her solution was to bury herself in typical fifties housewifely pursuits. She crocheted Santa Claus doorknob covers, stuck contact paper on everything that didn't move and decorated Bill's dinners with miniature roses sculpted from zucchini. It didn't help.

Birth of A Career
For a year after Betsy was born, Erma played doting mother and science teacher's wife. She had no plans to return to newspaper work but when she was offered the opportunity to edit the Dayton Shopping News, she grabbed the chance. The little paper contained mostly ads, but once again, Erma vented her timely wit in a personal column. Motherhood filled one void, she realized, her writing another.
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Although the doctor had claimed Erma would never conceive a child, she twice proved him wrong. In 1955, Andrew was born, followed by Matthew three years later.
In 1955, the Bombecks moved to Centerville, the city where Bill taught, and settled on a street bustling with growing families. Phil Donahue, his wife and five children lived across the street. For the first time, she met other women who were as frustrated as she was and who admitted it.
One day in 1964, Erma walked into the office of Ron Ginger, the editor of the local paper, the Kettering-Oakwood Times. "I'd like to do a column for you," she said. Simple honesty won the day. The editor fell for her charming intro and offered three dollars a week, and with a handshake -- although neither she nor Ron Ginger realized it at the time -- Erma Bombeck took a giant step on the road to fame and fortune.
From the beginning, professionalism marked Erma's work. She instinctively knew what good column writing entailed. Hook 'em with the lead. Hold 'em with laughter. Exit with a quip they won't forget. She turned out her columns in a cramped bedroom, the typewriter balanced on a plank suspended between a couple of cinder blocks.
Erma's column had run for some time in the Kettering-Oakwood Times when Glenn Thompson, the Dayton Journal-Herald editor, spotted her work. Thompson offered to up her pay and her workload -- $50 a week for two columns to run under her byline, if she would return to her old stomping ground. Erma could not imagine anything she wanted to do more.
Thompson sent a few of her columns to the Newsday Newspaper Syndicate and suggested they might be interested in syndicating Erma nationally. They were. Three weeks after her first column appeared in the Dayton Journal-Herald, Erma signed a short-term contract with Newsday. Thirty-eight papers were buying her 400-500 word columns by the end of the first year. Five years later "At Wit's End" was a staple in 500.
In 1988, Erma moved her column to Universal Press Syndicate. Over the years, she was with a number of others. "It's like deciding where to shop," Erma said. "A lot of stores offer the same merchandise, but some display the items better or will take returns without a receipt. Syndicates vary in the number of features they take on; the number of new features launched each year; the size and quality of their sales staff and the degree of aggressiveness with which they merchandise their contributors." Universal Press Syndicate distributed Erma's column at the time of her death.
As more newspapers signed her on, though, Erma was asked to lecture in the new cities. The thousands of women (and a surprising number of men) who turned out to hear her speak, applauding her every poke at their lives, thrilled and overwhelmed her. Their laughter rolled in great waves through the auditorium and confirmed that at long last they had found someone who understood them.
At first, Erma delighted in the trips, in meeting her fans who affirmed her life and work. Later, she grew tired of the endless series of hotel rooms and of being away from her family. She eventually left the speakers' circuit. But in 1966, it was new and exciting and she enjoyed every minute.

Erma's Fame Grows
As the number of newspapers that carried Erma's column grew, new opportunities opened up for her. Doubleday suggested publishing a compilation of a number of her columns. Erma, like most first-time authors, assumed the book's publication meant riches and fame. Unfortunately, it didn't happen.
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"Success," said Erma firmly, "is outliving your failures." She planned to do just that. In fact, the book, released in 1967, sold moderately well, about as expected for a first-time author just beginning to gain recognition through her tri-weekly humorous commentaries.
As Doubleday sales representative Aaron Priest toured the stores in his territory, he began to hear the same story from bookstore owners. He'd ask them how the company's "big book" (the most "important" or highly prized author's new release) was doing, and they would demand more copies of At Wit's End. Priest contacted the publishing company in New York and urged them to push the book. They ignored his advice. The company evidently didn't share Priest's excitement or belief in Erma.
Aaron Priest remained with Doubleday as Erma published two more books. One day she received a card from him. He had left Doubleday. He mentioned that if she ever had an idea for a book and needed an agent or someone to bounce her thoughts off, just give him a call. Maybe she'd like him to act as her agent.
For her first three books, Erma handled the details herself, but when she came up with the idea for the fourth, she tapped Aaron Priest. The idea Erma shared with Aaron in a phone call revolved around paralleling the settlement of the suburbs with the settlement of the American West. He asked her to send him an outline or a few pages of the book. He called her two weeks later and said, "My God, Erma, this has got to be worth six figures." She snapped back, "Don't tell my husband!" Two weeks after receiving the outline, Aaron Priest sold The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank to McGraw-Hill.
Erma found a comfortable if sometimes frantic pattern evolving as she continued to turn out newspaper columns and books. In 1969, she was asked to provide a monthly column -- "Up the Wall" -- for Good Housekeeping magazine, a service she continued for six years. Periodically she wrote for other magazines, including Reader's Digest, Family Circle, Redbook, McCall's and even Teen. In 1971, her second book. Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own, coauthored by Bil Keane, originator of the popular "Family Circus" cartoons, hit the bookstores.
Erma traveled around the country from her Ohio home base until one day she gave a speech in Phoenix. The midwestern native fell hard for the desert -- the stunning sunsets, the craggy mountains and the oddly twisted cactus dotting the landscape. Besides, the audience that night fell in love with her. That sealed it. Not long afterwards, the Bombeck family moved to Arizona.
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, Erma's next book, released in 1974, helped endear the writer to thousands of new mothers across the country. The book took a hard look at the thankless tasks of new motherhood, the same ones Erma had cried over some years before. She hoped with this book to ease the burden of new moms by helping them to spot the humor in their situations.
While Erma loved writing and enjoyed her growing popularity with readers, each new book, article, or trip to some faraway city to speak made her feel more isolated. Success was forcing her to abandon a normal life. Finally, she took a hard look and decided something had to go. The something was lecturing, which, although it enabled her to interact with her fans, demanded a heavy price. The balancing act between the two top priorities in her life -- work and family -- had begun to tilt too far to the former.

Political Involvement
In 1978, Erma was appointed to the President's National Advisory Committee for Women. The committee had originally been launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sought input from women representing every aspect of American political, ethnic and religious life. He asked this group to act as his eyes and ears in the country, relaying to him women's thoughts and ideas as they might impact American life.
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Although Erma appreciated being asked to join the commission, she never considered herself a political activist. In fact, she'd never been particularly interested in politics. But one issue forced her into the political arena. It was the Equal Rights Amendment.
In 1972, Congress approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. According to the Constitution, amendments, once approved by Congress, must be ratified by three-fourths of the states within seven years before becoming law. Within a year of its Senate approval, the ERA was ratified by thirty states. Polls showed that Americans favored the amendment by a large majority, but after the first burst of enthusiastic support, the ERA suddenly became the most divisive issue of the time.
It surprised a lot of people when Erma Bombeck, voice of the American housewife, came out in support of the ERA. But Erma saw no conflict. Discrimination of any kind had always angered her.
Her staunch support of the amendment did not, however, include its feminist leaders, whom she felt were on the wrong track. She sensed they were waging a war using housewives as the battleground. Erma believed in true equality, that no matter how you spend your life, you deserve recognition and acceptance and that the contribution you make to society by caring for your family should be considered equal to that made by anyone working at a job with regulated hours and pay.
Erma began an odyssey across the country under the auspices of ERA America, an organization whose only goal was to get the ERA passed. She traveled to almost every state where the battle for the ERA raged, but her political views never crept into her writing. By this time she had published six books of humor. In 1978, the paperback rights to If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? had sold for $1 million. Aunt Erma's Cope Book had received a near-record advance printing of 700,000 hardcover copies. Her column had spread to 900 newspapers and millions of people recognized her face.
Erma's fans were not disappointed in her. In fact, they rallied behind her and she took credit for changing some opinions. Women called her a "voice of sanity." When they heard that Erma was behind the amendment, they asked why. Once they understood, many joined her.
When asked by a reporter why she poured so much time and effort into the ERA, Erma replied, "I'm doing it for my kids. It will be important to them. It's also a great feeling to be a part of history. I wish that they could put this on my tombstone: She got Missouri for the ERA." Unfortunately, despite an extension of three years, time ran out and the ERA failed. It was one of the biggest disappointments of Erma Bombeck's life.

Good Morning America
Soon after The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank hit the best-seller lists, Erma received a call from producer Bob Shanks, who was putting together a new television show for ABC. NBC's Today Show had been sounding the public's wake-up call since 1952, but according to critics of the time, it had grown predictable and dull. Yet with no programming to challenge it, Today continued to pull a sizable audience.
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Bob Shanks took up the challenge. With Good Morning America, he hoped to create a program that informed and entertained at the same time, one that provided women with advice and ideas on how to run their homes.
Before talking to Erma, Shanks had already assembled a large and impressive cast, including David Hartman (who had starred in a TV western called The Virginian), Nancy Dussault (a television actress). Jack Anderson (a syndicated political newspaper columnist), Rona Barrett (her beat was Hollywood), Jonathan Winters (a roly-poly comedian), and Geraldo Rivera. Erma's response? "I can't imagine all those people in the same country let alone on the same show. I think you're out of your mind."
While Shanks seemed to agree with Erma's assessment regarding his state of mind, he was convinced that the concept would work, and he wanted her to be a part of it. He asked her to do two- or three-minute humorous "bits" and promised that her portions of the program would be filmed in Phoenix. She said, "Yes." Erma's decision proved a good one. Good Morning America hit the air in 1975 with easygoing David Hartman heading up the odd mix of characters Bob Shanks had harnessed.
Erma's stint on Good Morning America lasted eleven years. What began as two or three minutes of her zany twist on life evolved into longer interviews with celebrities, including Zsa Zsa Gabor (whom she interviewed in Zsa Zsa's king-size bed) and comedienne Phyllis Diller.
But regardless of how famous or important her interviewee, Erma never played the interrogator. Talking with her was like chatting with a friend. She employed a down-home, relaxed style.
Erma thrived with the supportive crew and loosely styled Good Morning America interviews. But eventually she grew tired of the travel, which carved ten days from each month. She decided to quit. It was hard to give up the show because she prized the job and adored the people she worked with. But she was exhausted. For more than a decade, in addition to two Good Morning America pieces a week, she had continued her column, "At Wit's End," written more books, produced a television show and, with Bill, managed to raise her children.

A Movie and a Sitcom
With the success of Erma's spots on Good Morning America, all kinds of offers poured in. One was to adapt The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank for a television movie, which, if successful, might lead to a permanent sitcom slot. On October 25, 1978, the TV movie starring Carol Burnett and Charles Grodin aired on CBS. Critics hated it.
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A year later, ABC, not in the least deterred by Grass's dismal showing, gave Erma a licensing fee to develop a situation comedy. She thought up a concept and pitched it to Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner (who produced a number of television hits including The Cosby Show). They liked it. Erma had never written a script and knew nothing about creating a television series, but she agreed to do some of the writing.
Erma drew the television family from her own life. The show looked at an ordinary, though slightly manic family from -- guess where? -- Dayton, Ohio. Erma fought to make the mother of the family, Maggie, believable. She didn't want Maggie outfitted in the latest fashion, sporting a hairstyle that only the Queen of England could afford. Maggie and her family (including a son who was never seen since he'd entered the bathroom when he hit puberty), as Erma envisioned them, were down-to-earth, no-frills types who struggled with everyday problems and often lost.
Everyone who needed to loved the pilot for Maggie, and the team received the go-ahead to produce a number of episodes. Erma was promoted to executive producer, something she knew even less about than writing television scripts.
Erma rented an apartment in Los Angeles. Awakening at 5 a.m., she'd dash off a column before climbing into a rented Toyota, race to Studio City by 9 a.m., work on scripts, oversee run-throughs, dress rehearsals, and editing until 9 p.m., fall into bed, wake up, and do it all again. On Friday nights, she would turn in the car at the Burbank airport and fly home to Bill and the kids, then boomerang back to L.A. again. She followed this routine for four months.
The network ordered 13 episodes. She hired writers but wrote five of the first eight scripts herself. The show, starring Miriam Flynn in the title role, hung on for eight weeks before it was canceled. Much to Erma's amazement, although the show died, the studio directors had no complaints. They asked her to develop another series. Erma turned them down flat. There was no way she could have kept up the crazy schedule any longer.
For Erma, the experience was far from a total loss. She'd made new friends and enjoyed working with the people who had developed the project and brought it to life. Like most of the other bumps in the road of Erma's life, the demise of Maggie proved a sad but not personally devastating experience. When it was over, she turned in her rental car and headed happily back to the desert for good.

I Want to Go to Boise
Erma had branched out from writing by producing a television series, stumping for the ERA and even recording a comedy album (The Family That Plays Together... Gets on Each Other's Nerves). But never had she leaned further out on a limb than when she wrote I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise. The book addressed a topic that was anything but funny -- children with cancer. Erma seemed an unlikely candidate to write a book on such a serious topic. People wondered how she would handle the subject.
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At first, Erma couldn't imagine writing anything humorous about cancer. Then Ann Wheat, assistant director of Arizona Childhood Cancer Services and director of Camp Sunrise (a camp for children with cancer) in northern Arizona, convinced Erma to visit Camp Sunrise, meet the children and then decide.
Erma heard laughter. She talked to some campers and discovered they were normal kids entirely free of self-pity. While battling the disease with fierce determination, they accepted the situation with a maturity that most adults found astonishing. They viewed cancer as an unwelcome visitor in their lives. It wasn't who they were. What cut deeper than the physical pain was the way healthy people treated them -- as though, once touched by cancer, they were transformed, too fragile for fun.
For almost three years, Erma walked and talked and lived the life of families with cancer. She learned that with or without a serious illness, kids love to have fun. They want to be treated the same as everyone else, and they thrive on pranks, silliness and practical jokes. A healthy child might thread rolls of toilet paper through the trees on her best friend's property. A child with cancer will twist the foot on his artificial leg so it faces the guy sitting behind him on the ski lift.
Time and again Erma saw that kids with cancer need to laugh. "If it hadn't been for my sense of humor," she heard over and over, "I wouldn't have survived this." She had to live their pain before she could understand their laughter.
It turned out that I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise (the title was suggested by a boy's three wishes) was not so different from books Erma had written before. Parts of it tickled the funny bone and parts made readers cry.
While not a mega hit, the book made a great deal of money. Erma assigned all American profits from the book to the American Cancer Society. Profits from foreign editions went to Eleanor Roosevelt International Cancer Research Fellowships, which brought foreign cancer specialists to America to study cancer patients and treatments.

Remembering Erma
The following article appeared in the Summer 1996 issue of the University of Dayton Quarterly.
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The University joined the nation in mourning the death of Erma Fiste Bombeck '49, its most famous graduate and the country's top chronicler of family life.
Bombeck, 69, died April 22 at a hospital in San Francisco after earlier undergoing a kidney transplant. For three decades she chronicled life's absurdities in a syndicated column carried by hundreds of newspapers. "She was twice as funny in conversation as in her columns and books," said Brother Raymond L. Fitz, S.M., president and a personal friend since the early 1980s. "Her humor always made us, in some sense, realize the frailty of our human life. At the same time, she could raise criticisms of institutions (in society). She had a good sense of social justice and the role of women in society."
In a 1991 interview with the University of Dayton Quarterly, Bombeck spoke of the encouragement Brother Tom Price, S.M., gave her. Price was the faculty adviser to The Exponent, the college literary magazine. "He said to me, 'Why don't you contribute some humor to this?' That was like a breath of fresh air," she recalled. "No one wanted to write humor at that time...It was tricky for one thing. To make fun of someone or something takes a pretty thick skin. I started to write humor for The Exponent, and one day he said to me three magic words: 'You can write.' It's all I needed as an impetus to keep going, and it sustained me for a long time. "Here's a man who reads Jane Eyre, who knows all these things. This man knows what he's talking about. I believed him. You need someone whom you respect to tell you something like that."
As a UD student, she converted to Catholicism. She gave back to UD in numerous ways, through both time and financial contributions. She served on the board of trustees from 1984 to 1987; co-chaired with her husband the National Alumni Challenge Campaign during the University's capital campaign in the 1980s; spoke at events on campus, including a writers workshop; and participated in advertising and direct-mail campaigns to help broaden the University's image and recruit students. In 1981, she received an honorary doctoral degree from UD. She was named an honorary trustee in 1988.
Friends at UD remember her as a witty, funny person who was serious about her studies. "Everybody knew everybody on campus, but Erma didn't run around much with the crowd because she was more serious about school. It's unusual to think about her being serious, but she was serious about school," recalled Ellie Kurtz '47, former director of the Kennedy Union. "She came back to campus in 1982 to speak at our writers workshop. We had a dinner with her after her talk, and she was a laugh a minute. The students just loved it."
Edwin (Sandy) King '49, professor emeritus, jokingly said that a sarcastic barb from Bombeck helped him rethink his career. "We had classes together and were on the newspaper together," he said. "I used to kid her about the fact that she changed my journalistic career into being a teacher. I wrote a column on veterans' affairs that was so boring, she thought it was a riot. 'Sandy, you are really a great writer,' she said."
Bette Rogge Morse '44, an adjunct communication professor and former local television personality, called Bombeck "the greatest humorist of our time." She remembered Bombeck's delight when she sent her a box of Esther Price chocolates, a reminder of her days as a Dayton housewife in the 1960s when she began writing a humor column about life in the suburbs. Bombeck told her, "I savored every bite and ate the whole box." Bombeck's death "is such a shock, I can't believe it," Morse said. "She'll be missed. She was a dear, dear person."
--Teri Rizvi

A Prayer for Erma
A prayer for Erma. A prayer for us.
The following prayer was read by Brother Raymond L. Fitz, S.M., University of Dayton president, at the funeral of Erma Bombeck '49.
Our response to these intercessions is Lord, hear our prayer.
For Erma who in baptism was given the pledge of eternal life, that she now be admitted to the company of the servants, we pray to the Lord.
For Erma who ate the body of Christ, the bread of life, that she may be raised up on the last day, we pray to the Lord.
For Erma's family. Bill, Betsy, Matt, Andy and Erma 's mother, and all us who are Erma 's friends, may we be consoled in our grief by the Lord who wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, we pray to the Lord.
Erma deeply loved her faith and her Church, and she had a wonderful gift of bringing together all God's people. May we continue to bring the gift of acceptance, reconciliation and love to one another, we pray to the Lord.
Erma taught us to understand the pain of a child -- the abused or those suffering the pain of serious illness. May we grow in our appreciation of the gift of children and pledge to build families and communities that care for children, we pray to the Lord.
Erma taught us to appreciate the vocation of motherhood, to appreciate our own mothers and to be better mothers. May the Lord strengthen mothers with love and good humor as they have their vocation, we pray to the Lord.
Erma helped us to understand the plight of women in our society and she gave her energy to change this situation. May God bless all who work for justice -- give them strength and courage, and Erma's humor, we pray to the Lord.
Erma's love and acceptance gave her insight on all of life's situations -- the profound and simple - affairs of the heart and the dressing room at Loehmann's. May all of us, especially those who suffer, find comfort in the medicine of laughter, we pray to the Lord.
Let us now take a moment of silence to lift up our own prayer from within our heart. We pray to the Lord.