"Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy."
If you read the newspaper between 1965 and 1996, you know who Erma Bombeck was. Her humor column chronicled the everyday life of American suburban mothers: carpooling, diets, children, housework, clothes shopping, suburban homes… She found the funny side of it all.
"My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you?"
By the mid-1980s, her column was appearing three times a week in 900 newspapers and she herself appeared on morning television a couple of times a week. Many of her columns were collected in a dozen books. Here are few to get you started: Forever, Erma; All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room; The Best of Bombeck; and If Life Is A Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?
"Never have more children than you have car windows."
Besides her newspaper columns, she also wrote a novel, The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, which was made into a TV movie with Carol Burnett and Charles Grodin.
"Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart."
Even though she died in 1996, her legacy in humor writing continues. Every other year, since 2000, the University of Dayton hosts the (always sold out) Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop for humor and human interest writers.
"When humor goes, there goes civilization."
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