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Joanne Azen Bloom earned Bachelor and Master of Education degrees at the University of Pittsburgh. From 1968 to 1978, she taught first grade at Greenfield Elementary School in that city, her hometown, while earning a reading specialist degree, primary and elementary degrees, and a behavioral disturbance degree. She taught special education in Midway, Utah, from 1979 to 1985. At eighty-five, she is still married to Tommy Tanzer, now a successful baseball agent, and continues to ski, golf, swim in the waves of Kauai, write, and travel while fighting a slow-moving cancer. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. This memoir, her first book, took ten years to write. She offers no apologies, therefore, in selecting an author photograph depicting how she looked at that time.

Tommy Tanzer played a key role in bringing this memoir back into print in 2024, supporting Joanne in her journey to share her story with a new generation of readers.

Joanne Bloom, née Azen, from a long-established Jewish family in Pittsburgh, was raised to be A Very Nice Girl in accordance with the pre-feminist norms of the 1940s.
She is nineteen when she marries the handsome boy-next-door who proves to be a serial philanderer. After twenty-three years of not-exactly wedded bliss, they have three grown children and a mountain of debt. Along the way, Joanne has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education and has taught first grade for ten years to help support the family. (Her husband, Jack, wagers and loses her entire first years’ salary in one weekend, by the way.) She finally divorces him, symbolically burns her bra (big mistake it melts in the fireplace), and falls in love with a man eighteen years her junior (huge secret). Tommy Tanzer is also on the way to becoming a teacher, but aspires to be a major-league baseball agent. The two move to Park City, Utah, for a fresh start, teach school for six years, and then decide to hit the road, traveling the country in a used camper-van, trying to sign up-and-coming players.
Big pipe dream? Of course. Ridiculous odds of success on multiple fronts? Sure. But they’re crazy for each other. And although Joanne believes in Tommy, she refuses to remarry: there’s that age differential, and she has huge trust issues, understandably not to mention a mother’s fierce devotion to her suicidal, mentally-ill daughter.
Eventually someone will wise up and make the movie about their lives. Until then, here is an unflinchingly honest memoir, by turns poignant, wrenching, and witty. Safe at Home offers a mosaic of vivid moments encompassing a lifetime that, viewed as a whole, present a woman’s journey of self-discovery and her moving testament to abiding and enduring love.