Funny, but Correspondent William McWhirter was a little nervous about doing a series of extensive interviews with Humorist Erma Bombeck for this week's cover story. After 20 years with TIME, the past three as Caribbean bureau chief covering such subjects as Central American revolutions and the Miami cocaine epidemic, McWhirter at first approached the assignment more as a fringe benefit than a job. Then he began to worry whether he was quite ready for a warm, wisecracking columnist whose chief concerns are the household gods. Says he: "Some journalists are fond of saying that the nice guys are the toughest, nice subjects the hardest. I didn't know: I could not remember the last time I had met one. What if I were to become the only person on earth to meet Erma Bombeck and not like her?"

McWhirter also found himself unprepared for another problem: Erma's cohort of female fans and their formidable powers of intimidation. "All the women in my own family," he says, "told me how lucky I was, how much fun I was sure to have, how much they wished they could come along, and how fortunate I was to be meeting someone who could help me understand them. They were certain that Erma was just like the lady in the column, vacuuming around the house and taping funny lines on the fridge. And if she wasn't, they didn't care, and surely I wouldn't find anything bad to report about someone as wonderful as Erma Bombeck--would I? Their injunctions were further reinforced by my seatmate on the flight to Phoenix and by the stewardess, who saw me studying up on Bombeck and who both told me how lucky I was to be traveling to the shrine of household humor."

The apprehensive McWhirter joined Bombeck over the course of several weeks this spring, participating in her own family birthday party, a charity benefit and a shoot for a Good Morning America segment. "Erma is a truly inventive, comic force, mugging continually, swatting one-liners everywhere," he says. "When she is on the phone, she is on the phone. Lunch is funny. The guest-bathroom soap is funny. Even the imminent house guests are funny."

Contributor John Skow, who wrote the coyer story, verified McWhirter's observations during his own visit to Bombeck's household. He was amazed, and appalled, by Bombeck's well-hidden efficiency: "She gets up in the morning, goes into her office and functions till 5," he notes. "She works on her column or her play, and they get done when she says they'll be done. That is terribly depressing to someone else trying to write." However, the two of them, each the parent of three children, did achieve instant rapport on the awfulness of adolescence. "She gave me more hope than she offers her readers," Skow says. "She reassured me that all one's children do eventually grow up and leave home."