An Uncommon Wit Appreciation: It’s a sad day for fans of Erma Bombeck, ‘The Socrates of the Ironing Board,’ who is dead at age 69. She always left us laughing, even as her own health deteriorated.

Erma Bombeck happily chucked her job in 1953 to stay home full-time with her first child. But she soon discovered that being a housewife wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

“I was really bored, cleaning the same stupid stove again and again,” she told a reporter for the Phoenix (Ariz.) Gazette more than 30 years later. “There was an isolation to it that I cannot begin to describe.”

Not exactly.

She became the voice of an entire generation of American women describing it pretty darned well. Her syndicated newspaper column, “At Wit’s End,” transformed the drudgery of housework and the trials of raising children into the rich stuff of humor, assuring millions of housewives that they weren’t alone.

Some of them cried after hearing that “The Socrates of the Ironing Board,” as a Baltimore author once labeled her, died yesterday in San Francisco of complications following a kidney transplant earlier this month. She was 69.

In 1964, she started out writing columns for her hometown newspaper in Centerville, Ohio, for three bucks a pop. When she died, her column was appearing in more than 600 newspapers with more than 1 million readers. And that was down from the pinnacle of her popularity, when more than 900 papers regularly carried her columns.

Never had anyone captured in such a hilarious way the routine of American home life, especially in suburbia. Her columns were about lost socks, late dinners, forgetful husbands, messy, noisy children, PTAs, car pooling, Tupperware parties and the mysteries of green fuzz in the refrigerator. American women understood exactly what she was talking about.

Erma Bombeck was, well, one of them. So they laughed. They bought the papers that carried her columns. They bought her books, 13 of them, with titles like “I Lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression,” “The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank,” “If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?” They watched her on national television for more than a decade.

And they made her wealthy — a millionaire many times over with an annual income topping $500,000. Yet she always portrayed herself as a wife and mother who did her own laundry and dusting.

“If I didn’t do my own housework, then I have no business writing about it,” she once said. “I spend 90 percent of my time living scripts and 10 percent writing them.”

Such was her popularity and persona that more than 9,000 people showed up to hear her speak in Kansas City — in an auditorium that seated only 3,500. And when a genetic ailment caused her kidneys to fail several years ago, more than 30 of her loyal fans offered to donate one to her.

Debbie Barnhardt, a retired bookkeeper living in Bowie, burst into tears when she learned of Mrs. Bombeck’s death yesterday.

“She was like a friend of the family,” said Mrs. Barnhardt, a longtime reader. “She wrote about everyday things that happened to all of us and made them funny and witty. Yet underneath it all was a real wisdom.”

Mrs. Bombeck was born Feb. 21, 1927, in Dayton, Ohio. When she was 9, her father died and her mother got a factory job, before remarrying two years later.

In school, she was described as having been shy and reticent. But in junior high school, she began writing a humor column for the school newspaper. In high school, she got a part-time job as a copy girl with the evening Dayton Herald. It was there she met Bill Bombeck, a World War II veteran and sportswriter for morning Dayton Journal.

They married in 1949, after both had worked their ways through the University of Dayton. Her husband became a teacher, but Mrs. Bombeck continued to work as a reporter for the Herald until the couple adopted a daughter in 1953. Six months later she became pregnant with the first of two sons.

She had a droll, sometimes bizarre sense of humor that was ideally suited for writing about everyday life. In later years, she mixed in some serious writing, but it was often laced with the humorist’s eye for detail.

Dealing with illness

One of her books, “I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise,” evolved from a talk with a counselor at an Arizona camp for children with cancer. And even though the 1989 work dealt with the surprising humor of children so ill, the interviews and the writing clearly had a profound effect on her.

It also, no doubt, helped her cope with her own encounter with cancer, which led to a mastectomy in 1992.

In a 1993 interview on ABC-TV’s “20/20”, she talked about her husband’s reaction the first time he saw her after the surgery: “I really looked [at Bill] while he was looking at me, and I didn’t see pity and I didn’t see shock; I didn’t see horror. I just saw love. That’s what I wanted to see, and you can do amazing things with that.”

The mastectomy complicated her battle with polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary ailment in which cysts form in the kidneys and make them unable to function. Her father died from the same malady, and she said genetic tests have indicated that her sons have it, as well.

One of Mrs. Bombeck’s kidneys was removed in 1993, and she had been essentially housebound in Paradise Valley, Ariz., for the dialysis treatments she administered herself in a room labeled “M.A.S.H. 401.” With no close relatives able to match her genetically, she had been awaiting a transplant several years. Yet she continued to churn out her columns with her usual wit until last week.

“Well Betty Crocker has had her eighth face lift, and I’m sitting here looking like a car backed over my face,” she wrote in what was her final column. “I’m not alone. There’s an army of women like me who talk about cosmetic surgery, but our philosophy prevails: No guts — live with the ruts.”

“She was a courageous performer at the end,” said Neil A. Grauer, a Baltimore writer who heard from her occasionally following his 1984 book “Wits & Sages” profiling her and 11 other outstanding American newspaper columnists. In the book, he dubbed her “The Socrates of the Ironing Board.”

“She had millions of friends who never met her,” he said after learning of her death yesterday. “She was a genius and a grand lady,” who could apply her brand of humor to a great many situations, including a roast in Baltimore in 1984 by a charity group called Saints & Sinners.

In her comments to the group after the roasting was done, she said she had come to “realize why the group had hired strippers for past roasts — it was the only thing that would add class to the event.”

‘Bombeck moments’

The tributes began quickly after word of her death became known yesterday.

“She was one of the greatest humorists America has produced in the last century. She had an insight into everyone’s life and is certainly going to be missed immeasurably,” said Bil Keane, syndicated cartoonist, who was Mrs. Bombeck’s friend for decades and who wrote one book with her.

“Erma Bombeck taught those of us who write columns that the funniest things are the things that our readers know the best — houses, cars, kitchens and, of course, kids,” fellow humor columnist Dave Barry said.

“Just mention her name and I smile,” says Andrew Ciofalo, a journalism professor at Loyola College who read her column regularly when he and his wife were raising their children.

“She would see the humor in the everyday occurrences of life that seem so difficult and make them more tolerable. Just as you walk through the day now and have a [Jerry] Seinfeld moment, you would walk through your life having Bombeck moments.”

Mrs. Bombeck is survived by her husband of 47 years, Bill; daughter Betsy; and sons Matthew and Andrew; and her mother, Erma Harris, of Sun City, Ariz.

In her own words

To hear excerpts of Erma Bombeck reading some of her classic essays, call Sundial at (410) 783-1800 and enter the 4-digit code 6175. For other local Sundial numbers, see the Sundial directory on Page 2A.

Bombeck gems

The memorable wit of Erma Bombeck:

* “I should have never given birth to more children than we had car windows.”

* “There are few events that provide more potential for violence than a wedding.”

* “A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle.”

* “If a man watches 16 consecutive quarters of football, he can be declared legally dead.”

Pub Date: 4/23/96