Erma Bombeck, who was as popular as Archie Bunker, was no Edith

“The bad times I can handle. It’s the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going to drop?”
— Erma Bombeck

This feels like the credo of a pessimist, or maybe a realist.

Whichever shoe fits, Erma Bombeck occupied some prime real estate in hundreds of newspapers for a great many years.

At her peak, in the 1970s, her syndicated humour column At Wit’s End was reaching an estimated 30 million readers. (To put that number in perspective, those numbers were similar to what episodes of All in the Family and the Mary Tyler Moore Show were typically getting in that era.)

My mother, Sheila Gushue, was one of those faithful readers. Mom had a habit of clipping Erma wisdom, and tucking it into a cookbook or a daytimer. Mom had been an editor at the Daily News and then the Evening Telegram in St. John’s, and I think her respect for Erma Bombeck stemmed from there.

At the time, Mom’s section was called the “women’s page” — a little bit of patronizing tone that Mom and many other women journalists endured in the Sixties and Seventies. In time, the topics of what would be rebranded as the “Life” or “Lifestyles” sections — health care, reproductive access, parenting, so much more — would be recognized for what they were: news.

Erma Bombeck, to my mind, faced similar limitations.

When she died at just 69 in 1996, she was the author of bestselling books and featured in television segments (she was a cornerstone of ABC’s Good Morning America), but I often got the sense that the industry saw her scope as limited to the household. Male columnists who delved into humour (like Art Buchwald and Russell Baker) were accorded much more credibility and, yes, respect.

Bombeck was writing about so much more than minding a house. She had profound and often stinging insight into human behaviour.

When the Roesch Library at the University of Dayton a couple of years ago put together an exhibit called Beyond the Byline, it selected some significant words for the subtitle:

Writer. Housewife. Feminist. Humorist. Mother. Columnist. Pioneer.

Sounds about right.