ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 24, 1996 TAG: 9604240020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID LEIBOWITZ COX NEWS SERVICE
Everywhere, to a woman, the spreading of the news drew the same reaction. A face drained of joy and a voice drained of cheer. And then, within a minute or two, these same women would get to laughing. Hard. Loud.
It was the stories that brought the mirth on. The old favorites quickly recalled, the newspaper columns clipped and hung with a magnet on the fridge, the book chapters that had gotten read aloud because they demanded to be shared. Summoning them up again, even in gloom, the women couldn't help but have one more laugh.
Erma Bombeck always did that to them.
In death just as in life.
That sad piece of news, Erma's passing at age 69, held the power of a brush fire Monday morning: Telling one soul worked like striking a match on a dry field. Pretty soon the whole beauty shop knew, or the laundromat, or the produce aisle. These were Erma Bombeck's domains, of course, and these women her subjects, though only in the literary sense. She was one of them, above all. That was the message yesterday, all over the Valley, her adopted hometown, and all over most every town, you imagined.
``I read her thousands of times,'' was the way Jean Siebert put it, in between customers at Kay's Village Hairdressers. ``She was the most honest, down-to-earth person who ever wrote.''
And then she remembered an old favorite - a column about when a child should call mom, and when not to - and this brought over Kay Barringer, a mother of two, a working woman, and a Bombeck fan.
``Uplifting,'' Kay explained. ``I think most of the time she was up. Funny. We really needed that when you look at everything else in the paper. And she told the truth. Boy, did she.''
Truth teller. Comedian. Inspiration. The sameness of the descriptions spoke volumes about the connection between writer and reader, as did the laughter and the smiles. You came to understand more about Erma Bombeck at each stop, with each giggly anecdote. She was the Domestic Goddess before Roseanne turned the role into something classless and vile, and a feminist, with all of that ilk's insight and none of their strident tone.
Susan Clegner, folding her husband and grandson's shirts at a coin laundry, had a noun of her own to add to the mix.
Friend.
``It just felt like you knew her after a while,'' said Susan. ``She'd been there, through what I was going through. Half the time, it seemed like she must've been standing there beside me in my kitchen. It's like losing a best girlfriend.''
And don't think women held a monopoly on loss and laughter yesterday. A few washers over sat Mark Hayden, a father of three and devoted Bombeck reader.
``Every day she had a story in the paper, I read it,'' he said. ``It wasn't just for housewives, her stuff. I've got three kids of my own, and she was always saying exactly what I was thinking about them. You know, they should put the flags at half staff for her.''
Last among the epitaphs came perhaps the best descriptive of all. The word goes beyond Erma, the writer, to Erma, the person, the woman who joked her way through breast cancer and a mastectomy, through kidney failure and four dialysis treatments a day, and who never used celebrity to vault her way up the transplant list.
She was courageous, said Kmart shopper Patricia Millicent.
``You would've never known she was hurting from her writing,'' she said. ``I never missed one if I could help it, and we're talking about all the way back to when I was in Indiana 20 years ago. I have all her books too. You know she could've got a kidney faster if she wanted one, but she never pulled any strings. There aren't a lot of people who are that funny and that brave.''
Here the recounting of the favorites began - the Bombeck theory of children and ``convenient hearing,'' how if it's Christmas then the measles must be on the way - and the laughter soon followed. Yes, Patricia Millicent had errands to run, yes, a dear one was suddenly gone.
``But with Erma,'' she said, ``it's hard to stay sad.''
LENGTH: Medium: 75 linesby CNB