Ohio Chautauqua is five days of music and living history

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.con

WARREN

Humorist Erma Bombeck, best known as a newspaper columnist who wrote about being a mother and housewife, died 23 years ago — meaning anyone younger than about 50 wasn’t raising kids when she was a staple of American life.

But to the mostly white-haired throng that filled the Ohio Chautauqua tent near the Warren Community Amphitheatre on Mahoning Avenue Tuesday night, hearing performer Susan Frontczak portraying Bombeck was like remembering a good friend.

Frontczak was dressed in a years-ago style of proper clothing as she slowly made her audience of more than 500 accept that she was the Dayton native who made funny stories out of the real-life challenges of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.

The performance was the first of a five-day run of free, 6:30 p.m. music and living history shows and audience participation. It will continue each night this week with similar presentations by performers bringing to life Air Force Commander Benjamin Davis Jr., Julia Child, Cesar Chavez and Robert F. Kennedy.

Also free during the day are 10:30 a.m. programs for youth and 2 p.m. programs for adults at the Warren-Trumbull County Public Library. A schedule is available at www.ohiohumanities.org/event/ohio-chautauqua-2019-warren/.

Over 50 minutes, she brought back the way people thought decades ago about things such as fathers, family members who stressed over wasting anything, avoiding weight gain, and values like honesty and responsibility.

“I was ordinary. That was to be my turf,” she said of the stuff that filled her columns, which were titled “At Wit’s End,” starting about the time her three children had reached school age in the 1960s. By 1967, she was syndicated in 900 newspapers across the country.

Because of the role of men when she was growing up in the 1940s, she said “having a father was like having a light in the refrigerator. Everybody had one, but nobody was quite sure what he did when the door was closed.”

She said she had lot of dolls when she was small, but she was “never quite sure what to do with the daddy doll. So I’d say, ‘I have to go off to work now,’ and throw it under the bed,” she said.

Bombeck always wanted to be a writer and go to college, even though her mother thought it was a bad idea. She and her husband Bill got married in 1949, and they adopted their first child in 1954 because she thought she couldn’t get pregnant.

Six months later, she was expecting. “I elevated exhaustion to a state art,” she quipped of her “three unplanned children.”

She earned $3 per column at first, then caught the attention of the editor of the larger paper in Dayton, the Journal Herald, and earned $50 per week.

She described her columns as stories about “the all-American family. We shout at one another. We cry. We slam doors. We goof off. We get sick. We make mistakes. We are members of good standing in your basic screw up family.”

At the end of her performance, Frontczak answered questions as Bombeck, then later took questions as Frontczak.

Many of the attendees Tuesday said they were fans of Bombeck’s columns when they were in the local newspaper.

“That’s how I raised my kids — a little bit of humor, a little bit of truth,” said Nancy Catron of Warren.

“She made me laugh about ordinary events in life,” said Carol Baker of Newton Falls, who attended with her husband, Don.

“I could relate to her all the time I was raising my family,” said Regina Speaker of Champion. She found Bombeck’s writings hilarious, but they contained “a lot of common sense, too.”

After it was over, Elizabeth Bloom of Warren said she thought Frontczak did a good job of representing Bombeck’s humor.