Erma Bombeck is arguably Centerville’s most famous citizen.  She was a newspaper columnist who achieved great popularity with her humor columns describing suburban homelife.

Between 1965 and 1996 she wrote over 4,000 newspaper columns, using humor to chronicle the ordinary life of a Midwestern suburban housewife.  It is estimated that her columns were read by 30 million readers in the 900 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. Her work stands as a humorous chronicle of middle-class life in the suburbs of America after World War II.

Erma was born in Bellbrook Ohio on February 21, 1927 to Cassius and Erma Fiste.  Erma’s father died in 1936 and the family moved to Dayton to live with her maternal grandmother.  She attended Parker Co-op High School, graduating in 1944.  She entered Ohio University in 1946, but dropped out after one semester, when her funds ran out, to enter the University of Dayton.  She graduated in 1949 with a degree in English and married Bill Bombeck, a fellow graduate, in that same year.  

Bill began his career as an educator and Erma started writing a column for the Dayton Journal Herald titled, “Operation Dustrag.”  She stopped writing the column in 1954 after the arrival of her daughter, Betsy, to devote her energies to being a mother and a housewife.   

The Bombeck’s moved to 162 Cushwa Drive in Centerville, with their three children, in 1959.  (The house was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.)

Once her children were all in school, she resumed her writing career with a weekly column titled, “Zone 59,” for the Kettering-Oakwood Times.  And, in 1965 her column, “At Wit’s End,” which she had started writing for the Dayton Journal Herald, was picked up by the Newsday Newspaper Syndicate for national distribution.  The popularity of this column led to the publication, in 1967, of her first book, also titled, “At Wit’s End,” published by Doubleday. The success of this book led to many more books and to new opportunities; for instance, she became a regular on the Arthur Godfrey radio show and, also, on ABC’s Good Morning America.

In 1971, the Bombeck’s moved to Paradise Valley, AZ, where she continued to write, enhancing her reputation as a humorist and a spokeswoman for the American family.

Erma’s books include “Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own,” “I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression,” “If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?” “Aunt Erma’s Cope Book,” “Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession,” “Family: The Ties That Bind . . . and Gag!” “All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann’s Dressing Room,” “When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It’s Time to Go Home” and “A Marriage Made in Heaven . . . or Too Tired for an Affair.”

Erma died on April 22, 1996, aged 69, from complications following a kidney transplant operation.  She is buried in Dayton’s Woodland Cemetery under a very large rock delivered to the cemetery from her home in Arizona.

To recognize Erma’s accomplishments, the Landmarks Foundation initiated the process to get the Erma Bombeck House placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Foundation hired Natalie Wright, a well-known preservation consultant, to do the research to qualify the property’s nomination and, in 2015, it was entered into the Register.

The Landmarks Foundation is proud to have been able to use our resources to get National Register of Historic Places status for the Erma Bombeck house.