Erma Bombeck, the housewife turned columnist who poked gentle fun at life in the suburbs, died Monday. She was 69.
She died at a hospital in San Francisco, where she had undergone a kidney transplant earlier this month, said Alan McDermott, senior editor at Universal Press Syndicate. He spoke from the syndicate's office in Kansas City, Mo.Bombeck was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1992. Shortly after the mastectomy, her kidneys began failing and she underwent dialysis four times a day at her Paradise Valley, Ariz., home. Doctors attributed the kidney problem to hereditary disorder called adult polycystic kidney disease.
Bombeck was on waiting lists to receive a kidney transplant until early this month when, after a suitable donor match was found, she underwent the operation at the Medical Center of the University of California-San Francisco.
The hospital said only that she died "from medical complications following a kidney transplant."
Bombeck began writing her column in 1965. It appeared twice a week in about 700 newspapers, amusing readers with her gentle, self-deprecating humor.
In a 1993 column on the popularity of the romance novel "The Bridges of Madison County," she wrote: "All over the country, housewives are fantasizing their husbands taking the kids to a fair and leaving them alone for four days. They're hiding bottles of wine behind the bleach in the utility room just in case. The other day, an exterminator knocked on my door asking for directions and I wondered, `Is he the one?' "
Bombeck was an Ohio housewife when she decided she would write a humor column about life in the suburbs. Knowing the editors of the Dayton Journal Herald would not be interested in someone with no experience, she began writing columns for the editors' neighborhood newspapers.
Within a year, she was writing two columns a week for the Journal-Herald, and three weeks later she was syndicated.
The family moved to Paradise Valley in 1971, but Bombeck still wrote about shopping at discount stores and said she never forgot the excitement of earning $3 per column when she began her career.
Bombeck also was a correspondent on ABC's "Good Morning America" for 11 years and starred in a short-lived television show called "Maggie." It lasted for only eight episodes in 1980.
Her books include "The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank," "I Lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression," and "When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home."