Angie Klink

Category: Culture Pops

I want to set the record straight—Erma is dead.

I apologize—especially to the spirit of Miss Erma—for not being more delicate, but a lot of folks believe humor columnist Erma Bombeck is still around. Evidently, they think she is simply suffering from an eleven-year-long writer’s block.

When I told friends that I would be attending the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton, I invariably heard, “Will Erma be there?” And then I had the responsibility of breaking the news that she died in 1996. Each person would look shocked, as if just last week, he or she had laughed through a reading of Erma’s syndicated column, “At Wit’s End.” So how could she be gone?

Perhaps these keepers-of-the-Erma-flame believe she is still hovering between her washer and dryer constructing her son’s costume for the school play. (In 1968 she told us he was cast as a participle.)

But, alas, she is not there. Erma is in humorist heaven.

On the elevator at the conference hotel, a man saw my workshop name badge dangling from my neck and asked, “Is Erma teaching?” I said my usual, “Ah, well, no. She’s dead.” After the gentleman looked so crestfallen, I got off at my floor and made a solemn vow to never again “play clergy” and break the news of Erma’s demise.

I decided the next time I would say, “Yes, Erma was there! I brought my Quija Board (purchased on eBay), and during the workshop séance, the ghost of Erma inched that plastic, heart-shaped doohickey with the viewing window and wiggling needle to spell out, letter-by-letter, this message:

“I’m dead. Pay attention.”

But, if I said that, then I’d be the one not paying attention.

In every nook and cranny of the writing conference, soft, airbrushed pictures of Erma stared down at me from posters and banners. She smiled at me from my complimentary writing tablet that screamed in bold type, “You Can Write!” (“Three little words from

Brother Tom Price that changed my life,” Erma once said of her former English professor.)

Before keynote speakers arrived and lunch was served, witty Erma quotes scrolled five-feet tall, and her “Good Morning America” television appearances flickered on an enormous projection screen. In the faded, 1980s TV clips, she sat on her living room sofa and talked to me about the grandmothering style of Miss Ellie on “Dallas.” (According to Erma, Miss Ellie said, “Yes, I’d be happy to baby-sit,” and then handed her grandkid to her Texan maid.)

Erma’s husband, Bill, and their three grown children were there—the offspring who ate the school lunches she packed—“a stick of gum and a holy picture in a sack with instructions to ‘Trade up’.”

Workshop sessions with such titles as “How to touch readers’ hearts with your words,” “Yes, you can write—funnier,” and “Oh, the places you’ll go with a column!” all beheld the perfume of Erma.

Erma was so alive at the workshop that I thought of a book I had on my office shelf—a collection of her columns gathered together after her death, fittingly entitled Forever, Erma.

So then, I made a new decision. When people asked if Erma was at the workshop, I would give an Erma-like response: “No,” I’d say. “Haven’t you heard? She’s gone up to that big utility room in the sky to look for all those socks her washer ate…the ones she told her kids went to live with Jesus.”

Perhaps people would accept that.