INTRODUCTION
In the 1960s and 1970s, Mom designed a few different editorial columns, satirically geared toward working homemakers like herself (or those who just want to laugh at life), mailing out samples to over 300 newspapers.
Within a year, she was steadily writing two different columns (“No Laughing Matter” and “Minding the Hearth”) for 60 regular papers. Mom found her life, as a struggling, working homemaker, wife, and mother of five, to be the best subject about which to write and it was so relatable to so many of her readers.
Mom also created paralleling cartoon panels, which she called “Full House – as Kept by Gloria Pitzer”; all of which likewise depicted her life in the 1960s and1970s, during the Women’s Liberation movement.
The internet is an awesome source of information and archives for finding some of Mom’s old “No Laughing Matter” columns; as well as her old cookbooks that have been out of print for years but can still be found on Amazon and eBay (sometimes for ridiculous amounts because they’re no longer in print).
I’m dedicating this tab and these monthly posts to her ageless, satirical, creative writing talents. I have a couple of binders full of her humorous columns and I look forward to re-sharing them all, here.
In honor of The Dog Days of Summer, Family Fun Month, and American Family Day; as well as for Mom’s comedic writing legacy, here’s another one of her old “No Laughing Matter” columns about some of our “family fun”, when I was young…
As seen in…
“No Laughing Matter”, By Gloria Pitzer (circa 1970s)
NEED A VACATION? WAIT ‘TIL RETURN!
[aka: VACATION RETURNS (OR THE LAST RESORT)]
IT IS ONLY UPON returning from a vacation that we realized just how much we could use one! Ours was nothing to write home about, so all of you out there, who were looking for a postcard from us, now know why you didn’t get one.
If – [even] when I [was] at home, among conveniences, and circumstances used to force me to once write those “please-excuse-my-child” notes in lipstick on the back of a Citizen’s Federal Savings [bank] slip and take telephone messages down in the dust on the end tables – you just know that any postcard I’d be apt to send from our vacation would probably be written in campfire charcoal on the back of a Handi-Wipe!
I still hate to refer to it in the strictest sense as a “vacation”. I mean, a cross country trip by station wagon with our five kids would be anything BUT a vacation! And somehow, I recall that the cross country trip got even more cross as we crossed the country, when we were traveling with the kids – especially on the way back [home].
We spent more time deciding which child got to sit next to the window than we ever did reading the road maps – and that was just in the driveway, before we even left home!
“You don’t go on vacation with your kids – you just parent in a different location.” – Brandon Hudson, FOX 2 News, Detroit (June 30, 2026)
Upon reading those maps, however, we would be forced to make the crucial decision – deciding which fork in the road to take. Usually, [we chose] the wrong fork in the road – but then we had never been lost that way before.
Once in a while, and even to this day, when Paul and I travel alone, without the children to distract us, we’ll find we’re lost on some turnpike off ramp and, when out of state we’ll hope to see another vehicle with a Michigan license plate and start to follow them because we’re convinced that they know where they’re going and will probably, at least, get us back to the state line.
But, in our case, [we] could use a bumper sticker for the car that reads: “Don’t follow me… I’m lost, too!” When the children were vacationing with us, in the old days, it seemed that “who-sits-next-to-the-windows” is an on-going debate.
The argument got so sticky at one point that I simply buried my face in a AAA tour book and pretended not to hear them until, [seemingly] from the midst of the back seat crowd, came a tortured voice, which pleaded in anguish, “But I HAVE to sit by the window!”
“Nonsense!” I said, without looking up. “Give me one good reason WHY you HAVE to sit by the window!”
“Because” said the voice with some agitation. “I’m driving! I’m Daddy!”
Even the cost of a simple vacation has been affected by the national inflation, I see today. You might say the cost of getting away, has gotten away; because, if you really wish to relive your vacation, the only way you can do it these days is to show your friends colored slides of all of your traveler’s checks!
We did learn a few things, though, about our trips [that] I’m perfectly willing to share with you. We now realize that the same vacation conveniences that would cost us $90 a day, while traveling, we could have had for free if we had stayed home.
Besides, nothing can deflate your ego, or undermine your significance as a person, like returning from a 3-week vacation; and, as you begin to carry the suitcases from the car into the house, have your neighbor greet you with: “Hi there! Going someplace?”
All we have to recall of our last vacation is the vivid memory of how the best restaurant to eat in was always just a block down the road from the one we stopped at and thought it would be the last one we’d come to before dark.
But I will always remember how Daddy would lie on the beach about how he was missed at the office! And…that hitchhiker we picked up, who, within 5 minutes, begged us to let him out of the car because he had been suddenly drenched with a Dairy Queen milkshake and 6 popsicle sticks were poked into his fringe-sleeved, suede jacket.
As I said, if you’re traveling with children, and you think you need the vacation you’re about to take, it’s nothing compared to the one you’ll be ready for when you get back!
LAST THOUGHTS…
For questions or comments, you can email me at therecipedetective@outlook.com. I’m also on Facebook: @TheRecipeDetective.
[NOTE: As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share this.]
