While she was in college, her English professor, Bro. In addition, she worked two part-time jobs – as a termite control accountant at an advertising agency and as a public-relations person at the local YMCA. She lived in her family home and worked at Rike's, a department store, where she wrote humorous material for the company newsletter. She left after one semester when her funds ran out.Įrma later enrolled in the University of Dayton, a Catholic college. However, she failed most of her literary assignments and was rejected for the university newspaper. Using the money she earned, Erma enrolled in Ohio University at Athens, Ohio, in 1946. Having completed high school in 1944, Erma sought to earn a college scholarship fund for a year she worked as a typist and stenographer, for the Dayton Herald and several other companies, and also did minor journalistic assignments (obituaries, etc.) for the Dayton Herald.

In 1944, for her first journalistic work, she interviewed Shirley Temple, who visited Dayton, and the interview became a newspaper feature. That same year she began work at the Dayton Herald as a copygirl, sharing her full-time assignment with a girlfriend. In 1942, she entered Parker (now Patterson) Vocational High School, where she wrote a serious column, mixing in bits of humor. Formative years Įrma entered Emerson Junior High School in 1940, and began writing a humorous column for its newspaper, The Owl. Erma practiced tap dance and singing, and worked for a local radio station for a children's revue for eight years. Her mother remarried in 1938, to Albert Harris (a moving van owner). After Erma's father died in 1936, she moved, with her mother, into her grandmother's home. She particularly enjoyed the popular humor writers of the time.

She began elementary school one year earlier than usual for her age, in 1932, and became an excellent student and an avid reader. Young Erma lived with her elder paternal half-sister, Thelma. Her parents were Erma ( née Haines) and Cassius Edwin Fiste, who was the city crane operator. Her work stands as a humorous chronicle of middle-class life in America after World War II, among the generation of parents who produced the Baby Boomers.Įrma Fiste was born in Bellbrook, Ohio, to a working-class family, and was raised in Dayton. By the 1970s, her columns were read semi-weekly by 30 million readers of the 900 newspapers in the U.S. She also published 15 books, most of which became bestsellers.īetween 1965 and Ap– five days before her death – Bombeck wrote over 4,000 newspaper columns, using broad and sometimes eloquent humor, chronicling the ordinary life of a Midwestern suburban housewife. Erma Louise Bombeck ( née Fiste Febru– April 22, 1996) was an American humorist who achieved great popularity for her newspaper humor column describing suburban home life, syndicated from 1965 to 1996.

Erma bombeck cherries