Erma Bombeck

Erma Bombeck excelled at writing from a young age and wrote for her school’s newspaper in junior high, high school, and college. After Bombeck got married, she became a full-time housewife from 1954 to 1964. In 1964, Bombeck started writing a weekly column for the local Kettering-Oakwood Times, and in 1965, she started writing two weekly columns for the Dayton Journal Herald as well. These columns soon went into national syndication under the title “At Wit’s End.” Bombeck became a popular humorist, and over the next 31 years, she would write over 4,000 columns and 15 books. She died of complications after a kidney transplant in 1996, at age 69.