A few years ago, when it became known that Erma Bombeck was suffering from kidney failure, about 30 of her readers offered to donate their kidneys.
It's a rare writer who can inspire that kind of devotion, but to many of her fans Bombeck was more than just a funny newspaper columnist whose work they admired; she was a friend.Her subject matter was, for the most part, the stuff of everyday American suburban, middle-class family life. Bombeck, married to the same man for nearly 50 years and the mother of three children, knew her beat inside and out, and it showed. Her work had an authenticity her readers sensed and appreciated. She'd been through it all, just as they had. Whether she wrote about dirty ovens ("If it won't catch fire today, clean it tomorrow") or adolescents ("Don't ever say you understand them. It breaks down the hostile relationship between you that it takes to understand one another"), it was obvious she knew her subject matter firsthand.
Bombeck was usually described as - and often unfairly dismissed as - a "housewife humorist," and she was. But she was also a gifted writer blessed with the comic equivalent of perfect pitch. Her humor seldom seemed forced or superimposed on her material. Her writing style was colloquial, intimate and natural. Even if you'd never met her, you felt as if you knew her. And if you did meet her - and I did, once - you found that she was every bit as likable and down-to-earth as you imagined she would be.
Her choice of subject matter led many readers to believe that she was a suburban mother who started writing columns as a lark. She was indeed an at-home mom when she started writing for her neighborhood newspaper, but until the birth of her first child she had worked as a feature writer for the Dayton (Ohio) Journal-Herald.
She once joked that she started writing a column because "I was 37, too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair." But she was very serious about the craft of comic writing. She told one interviewer that she had wanted to write humor since she was in the eighth grade, when she began reading James Thurber, Robert Benchley, H. Allen Smith and Max Schulman.
In 1965, less than a year after she began writing her column, it was picked up by the Dayton Journal-Herald, where it ran twice a week. Just a few weeks later the column was syndicated and began appearing in 20 newspapers. By the time the Bombecks moved to Arizona in 1971, it was running in 200 papers. It was something of a journalistic phenomenon. Women readers, searching newspapers for a voice they could relate to, found her and made her a star. And men loved her work, too, because she was so tuned in to the absurdity of everyday life. At the peak of her career, in the 1970s and '80s, her column ran regularly in as many as 900 newspapers.
Bombeck branched out into TV and books. She was a twice-a-week commentator on "Good Morning America." And most of her 11 books were best sellers.
In 1992 she learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Her kidneys had been deteriorating for years because of a congenital kidney disease. In 1993 her kidneys gave out and she began undergoing dialysis four times a day while waiting for a transplant.
Her columns continued throughout her illnesses, as always. She waited three years until a compatible kidney donor was found. She entered the hospital on April 5 for a transplant, having given Universal Press Syndicate two weeks' worth of columns in advance. She may have been a housewife humorist, but she was also a professional.