Up the Wall with Erma

"My husband," Erma Bombeck cheerily told a visitor last week, "works as a supervisor of social studies for secondary schools, and if you have a space between your teeth that's hard to say." Syndicated Columnist Erma has a big space between her own front teeth. She also has, by her description, "fat calves, unmanicured hands, makeupless eyes" and is "overweight, overworked, over-childrened and underpatienced." But one thing is clearly going for her: irresistible humor about the trials of being a housewife.

The humor shows in her antic put-ons and putdowns, mostly of herself. It shows in her laughter, a corroboree of chuckles, whinnies and convulsions. And it shows in her writing. Simple in style, mundane in subject matter, her thrice-weekly column for 200 newspapers (including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe) has a title that precisely conveys her puckish point of view. She calls it "At Wit's End." What most tickles Erma, a former women's news reporter for the Dayton Journal Herald, is her unfashionable fascination with being a housewife. Her beat, she once wrote, is the utility room.

If Onassis Knocks. It sounds dreary, but Erma can stir smiles with columns on how to handle a dirty oven ("If it won't catch fire today, clean it tomorrow"), hand-me-down clothes, daytime naps, gardening, sibling rivalry ("Who gets the fruit cocktail with the lone cherry on top?"), chewing gum, home barbering and the ids of March. "If a woman is ever to have an affair" a recent column began, "it will be in March. Psychologically, it is a perfect month. The bowling tournaments are over. The white sales on bedding are past. Your chest cold has stabilized and the Avon lady is beginning to look like Tom Jones."

Few of Erma's columns deal with such dreams of an everyday housewife, or even with easy big issues like abortion and the Pill. She mainly focuses on routine reality. Sample, on the perils of being without an ordinary pencil: "If Onassis knocked on the door and wanted to buy our house for a highway phone booth, I would have to sign the agreement with (a) an eyebrow pencil, (b) yellow crayon, (c) cotton swab saturated in shoe polish, (d) an eyedropper filled with cake coloring, or (e) a sharp fingernail dipped in my own blood."

Erma has been called a champion of the Great Silent Majority. That upsets her. For one thing, she is a staunch Democrat. Worse, "it sounds like I'm totally uninvolved--like being a ski instructor in Berlin during World War II." She has been criticized for not championing the feminist revolution. That suits her fine. Most of the revolutionaries, she says, "are just like roller-derby dropouts, or Russian pole-vaulting types." The uncharacteristic club is quickly replaced by a tickling feather. She adds: "When I make speeches I'm always asked, 'Have you burned your bra yet?' I tell them I took a halfway measure: I scorched mine on the ironing board."

Erma rarely lectures and seldom ap pears on television. She spends most of her time on a 30-acre farm in Bellbrook, Ohio, a small town 10 miles south of Dayton. Besides her newspaper column (which was launched by the Dayton Journal Herald in 1965, is now syndicated by Publishers-Hall and last year earned her close to $50,000), she writes a monthly column for Good Housekeeping entitled "Up the Wall" and is working on her second book.

Lies a Lot. Recently turned 43 ("I don't mind telling, because I look older and then people are pleasantly surprised"), Erma has three children --Betsy, 16, Andy, 14, and Matt, 11. The farm has three smelly dogs; three horses, one of which is pigeon-toed and wears orthopedic shoes; and 28 "oversexed" ducks, one of which Erma calls Myra Breckinridge. "We also used to have white mice," she says. "Now we've got brown ones, everywhere."

Erma does her writing in a tiny room, her electric typewriter near a mink-lined bucket stuffed with fan (and not-so-fan) letters. Some ask for recipes; though cooking is not her forte, she answers every request. "I lie a lot," she admits. "I grab a magazine, find a recipe and say, This is an old family favorite.' " When it comes to criticism, she thinks that her husband Bill is overly frank. But, in fact, she is her own toughest judge, seldom satisfied with what she writes and rewrites. "But on the days that you click," she says, "it's great. It sure beats giving Tupperware parties."

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