And on Other Home Fronts

By J.D. Reed

From Puget Sound to Pennsylvania Avenue, typewriters clack at kitchen tables and computer screens glow in closets. Who cares if the roast burns or the dog sheds on the couch? Not the scores of homemaker-columnists who are busy pounding out their copy. Such trifles must wait their turn behind dreams of hitting it big like Bombeck.

Bombeck's success has spawned a split-level cottage industry. In newspapers throughout the land, local scribblers focus on the foibles of their own lives and families to win sympathetic chuckles from readers. And readers cannot seem to get enough. Most of these Bombeckians receive more mail by far than their publications' other life-style columnists, some are nationally syndicated, and a few have had their work collected in book form. None are precise Erma clones, and they wryly observe life from varieties of settings including city apartments and even Embassy Row. But wherever they call home, the dryer is on the fritz and the kids are unfathomable. Following is a selection of the different types who are working their own corners of territory in and around Bombeck country.

> Carol Dykstra, 46, lives in a most proper neighborhood of that country. At her Cape-style home in Braintree, Mass., the shy, dark-haired wife of a silverware-company executive can be as reserved as the framed family pictures in the living room. But beneath the propriety is the heart of a humorist. Dykstra struggled to be a comic writer for a decade, but got little encouragement until Bombeck responded to her advice-seeking letter by urging perseverance, "because there isn't enough humor in the world." Dykstra pressed on, and two years ago began selling" whimsical pieces to the Boston Herald. Last year she was given her own weekly column, "That's Life," which appears in the paper's Sunday edition. She is delighted that opportunity knocked after her three children entered adolescence. "When they're young," she says, "you're too tired to write."

While Dykstra attacks the media hype of subjects such as soap-opera wives and Prince William's wardrobe, her best work pokes giggles into the generation gap. Climbing three flights of stairs to inspect her 23-year-old son's first apartment left her feeling "like Jane Fonda's mother in Barefoot in the Park." Her teen-age daughter is fond of making over Mother: "Mom, lemme mayo your hair." And a saccharine greeting card, "To a Special Daughter," prompted Dykstra to write: "It's their knack for leaving razors face up in the shower that makes them special."

> Sondra Gotlieb, 47, writes about her unusual home life twice a month in the Washington Post. The address: 1746 Massachusetts Avenue. She is the wife of Allan Gotlieb, Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., and her official residence, she quips, "is something between a private home and a public drinking place." The energetic and outspoken author (two novels plus travel and humor works) peoples her pieces with a lively cast of capital types. Melvin Thistle Jr. from State always arrives late; the elderly Baron Spitte switches place cards if he is positioned below the salt, and bitchy Partygoer Popsie Tribble typically advises, "Remember, you're sitting next to a job, not a person." Gotlieb's columns, in the form of letters to a fictional friend back in Ottawa, cast wry glances at officialdom and toss bemused barbs at her own role as a Washington "Wife Of." Diapers and car pools are not her problem, but "if you don't know the results of the last two primaries and you're having people for dinner, you might as well just go upstairs and cry." As she has written, "Wives Of get wrinkles at a younger age in Washington than in any other city."

> Marlyn Schwartz, 40, a 15-year veteran of the Dallas Morning News, has never been married. Without husbands, children and mortgages, what could be funny? Plenty, to Schwartz, who reported school and court news and wrote obituaries before turning to a humor column six years ago. Her three-times-a-week column turns a seen-it-all eye on the singles life.

Ann Landers once called her for advice (on writing about divorce, a Schwartz specialty). When the Hell's Angels hired a p.r. firm to upgrade their image, Schwartz went to the party expecting anything. She reported they were wearing designer jeans and had an ice sculpture. They sent her flowers after missing an interview. Says she: "They were mortified."

Schwartz shamelessly takes ideas from friends' experiences. Says the writer: "It's easier to find new friends "than new columns." She also digs a working woman's elbow into dippy socialites and celebrity puritans like Diet Doctor Nathan Pritikin, whom she took to a Dallas taco joint. While he showed her how to eat healthily even there, she thought ravenously of "guilty nachos." Discovering Orlando, Fla., Schwartz announced, "Forget singles bars, forget computer matchmaking, forget gourmet dating clubs. If you want to meet a man, head straight for Disney World . . . I was there last week--and so were half of the divorced fathers in America."

> D.L. Stewart, 41, settles down at the typewriter four times each week to record household observations in the best Bombeck tradition. The difference is in the voice: Stewart has a much deeper one. D.L., who was known as Denny before legally changing his name to initials, is a liberated husband of 20 years and the father of four. In a Dayton Journal Herald column, he writes about the ordinary upsets at his tri-level home in the bedroom community of Beaverbrook, Ohio. Stewart has not always been one of the dinette set, however. In the beginning, he wanted to be another Jimmy Breslin, but after hanging out in locker rooms, the curly-haired journalist realized ten years ago, "You don't have to write about armpits and jockstraps to be a man."

Indeed, all he needs to do is observe his children. Two fast-selling books are devoted to their antics, and a third collection, Father Seldom Knows Best, will hit the racks next year. In those, along with a five-day-a-week radio call-in show and his "Off the Beat" column, he seems always to be reversing 9-to-5 cliches. Just before a meeting with his woman boss, for instance, he spilled hot tea on his pants. "I stand in front of her desk," he wrote, "my cheeks are flaming. My thighs are steaming." When his twelve-year-old son's science project turns out to be playing rock music to the house plants, the consequences for the plants, he writes, are surreal: "They're all deaf and two of them are starting to grow zits. And last night our Boston fern's hair caught fire." Stewart remembers when Bombeck wrote at the Dayton paper early in her career. "I wouldn't say that I looked at her and saw she was making $40 million and said, 'God what a racket!' But she certainly gave me an inspiration." --By J. D. Reed