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By Teri Rizvi

As a teenager, Erma Bombeck dreamed of going to college and becoming a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

Jim Harris, her journalism teacher at Patterson Vocational High School in Dayton, Ohio, “believed in me,” she wrote in Roses in December: my life story and other memories, a memory book that’s now part of the Erma Bombeck Collection in the University of Dayton’s Archives. “Everyone,” she wrote, “told me I was good at writing.”

Her responses to questions about her early years paint a picture of a hardscrabble, blue-collar childhood filled with a mother’s love and a child’s dreams.

The family lived in a “spotless” two-bedroom rental home with curtains dividing the living and dining rooms and a washer on the small back porch. The laundry on the clothesline flopped in the wind on Mondays, “and the kid next door used to shoot at my panties with a sling shot. I hated him.”

She shared a bedroom with her older half-sister, Thelma, whom she later took dance lessons with, and they performed in amateur contests. With the pocket money they earned by turning in glass beverage bottles for deposits, they “splurged” on shaved ice drenched in sweet syrup at the drug store. For relaxation, the family went fishing on weekends and enjoyed sitting on the front porch every night during the summer.

It was a simple life, by necessity. “My dad was out of work (the Depression), and we lived on bare bones,” she wrote.

Travels and adventures were “few and far between,” she scrawled in the book. “Celina, Ohio, was as far as we got. Stayed overnight in the car. One morning my eyes were swollen shut with mosquito bites.”

Tragedy hit the family when she was 9. Her father, Cassius, then a crane operator for the city of Dayton, died after a cerebral hemorrhage. Bombeck wrote that she learned “survival” from her mother, Erma, suddenly widowed at 25.

Bombeck described her mom as a woman with “lots of energy and the need to be in the middle of creativity. She couldn’t watch a parade; she has to be in it.” She “wrote the book on single mothers.”

As a child at Wilbur Wright Elementary School, Bombeck loved wearing embroidered dresses and white high top shoes. She played hopscotch, Red Rover and softball, but she adored her dolls, whose clothes were made by her mother. At Emerson Junior High School, she graduated to wearing “short skirts and poodle sweaters.” She remembers skating with her friends, being involved in Girl Scouts and enjoying slumber parties and movies. In the memory book, she jotted “Van Johnson fan club,” alluding to her infatuation with the film heartthrob.

“When my friends and I were left to our own devices, we drank a lot of sodas at Charlene Jones’ store on the way home (from school). It was our big vice,” she confessed.

From an early age, Bombeck loved books. “I started going to the library and checking out books by the shopping bag. I told the librarian the more adult ones were for my mother,” she wrote.

Her favorite classes at Patterson Vocational High School were journalism, shorthand and typing. With earnings from a part-time job as a copy girl at the Dayton Herald, she bought her own clothes during high school.

In describing an event that “altered the course” of her life, she wrote about meeting Bill Bombeck, who worked as a copy boy at the same time. She knew he was special because “I couldn’t forget him and get on with my life.” Her ideal mate, she wrote would have these traits: “kindness, humor, intelligence and (be) a liberal Democrat — a hunk.”

At their 1949 wedding at the Church of Resurrection, she remembers that “it was hot, Bill was late, everyone looked so grand, Grandma smiled, I was terrified.” They spent their honeymoon in a cabin “with a bear trap outside the door” at Sunny Lake Ranch in Glennie, Michigan, and moved into a duplex across the street from where Bill was born in Dayton. For the first year of their marriage, they lived on her newspaper wages while he finished his education degree at their alma mater, the University of Dayton.

Bombeck saved some of her most descriptive writing in the memory book for the arrival of her three children, who later became fodder for her nationally syndicated column and books.

Betsy, she wrote, could have starred in “an Ivory soap ad” with “her beautiful blue eyes and little fat cheeks.” She wasn’t into dolls; “she was into knobs on TV sets.” Andy’s hair “was so yellow at birth, it looked like a wheat field.” He put everything in his mouth “and could get a bell out of a toy in 10 seconds. Then he was bored.” The family called Matt “Maple head because of his red hair.” She described him as “a long-torsoed baby who never seemed to need anything.” He was “a first-rate crawler. Probably why he wasn’t in a hurry to stand up. He didn’t have to.”

Throughout the book, Bombeck’s recollections are filled with unpretentiousness and self-deprecating humor, the kind of writing that endeared her to millions of readers.

“Her joy for life, her love for family and the fun she brought to us and the world showed in everything she did throughout her life,” said her daughter, Betsy.

— Teri Rizvi

Teri Rizvi is the founder and director of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop at the University of Dayton, where she serves as executive director of strategic communications.