On the morning of April 22, 1996, the most beloved American housewife writer of the entire postwar 20th century died of surgical complications at a small San Francisco hospital. She was 69 years old. She had undergone a small kidney transplant operation 19 days earlier. She had been quietly battling polycystic kidney disease for the previous 30 straight years. Her name was Erma Louise Fiste Bombeck. She had been, by every reasonable estimate of the American syndicated newspaper industry, the single most widely read working female humorist in the United States from approximately 1968 through her death. She had been writing her small twice-weekly column "At Wit's End" for 31 straight years. She had been syndicated in 900 American and Canadian newspapers. She had been read every single morning, by the early 1980s, by approximately 30 million American housewives at their small breakfast tables before they sent their husbands to work and their children to school. She had insisted, throughout her entire 31-year working career, that this had been the secret to everything she had ever written. She told The New York Times once, in one of the small interviews she gave very late in her career: "My type of humor is almost pure identification. A housewife reads my column and says, 'But that's happened to me! I know just what she's talking about!' If I didn't do my own housework, then I have no business writing about it. I spend 90 percent of my time living scripts and 10 percent writing them." She had done her own housework throughout every single one of her 31 working years. Erma Louise Fiste had been born in the small farming town of Bellbrook, Ohio, on February 21, 1927. Her father had been a small Dayton city crane operator named Cassius Edwin Fiste. Her mother had been a small homemaker named Erma Haines Fiste, after whom Erma had been named.