Posted on 01/31/2007 3:53:45 PM PST by lunarbicep
Molly Ivins, whose biting columns mixed liberal populism with an irreverent Texas wit, died at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at her home in Austin after an up-and-down battle with breast cancer she had waged for seven years. She was 62.
Ms. Ivins, the Star-Telegram’s political columnist for nine years ending in 2001, had written for the New York Times, the Dallas Times-Herald and Time magazine and had long been a sought-after pundit on the television talk-show circuit to provide a Texas slant on issues ranging from President Bush’s pedigree to the culture wars rooted in the 1960s.
"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ms. Ivins at the newspaper’s Austin bureau in 1992, a few months after the Times-Herald ceased publication. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn’t hurt so bad."
A California native who moved to Houston as a young child with her family, Ms. Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. Two years later after enduring a radical mastectomy and rounds of chemotherapy, Ms. Ivins was given a 70 percent chance of remaining cancer-free for five years. At the time, she said she liked the odds.
But the cancer recurred in 2003, and again last year. In recent weeks, she had suspended her twice-weekly syndicated column, allowing guest writers to use the space while she underwent further treatment. She made a brief return to writing in mid-January, urging readers to resist President Bush’s plan to increase the number of U.S. troops deployed to Iraq. She likened her call to an old-fashioned "newspaper crusade."
"We are the people who run this country," Ms Ivins said in the column published in the Jan. 14 edition of the Star-Telegram. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.
"Raise hell," she continued. "Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge."
She ended the piece by endorsing the peace march in Washington scheduled for Saturday. 01-27 "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!' " she wrote.
The spice of Texas
Born Mary Tyler Ivins on Aug. 30, 1944, in Monterey, Calif., Ms. Ivins was raised in the upscale River Oaks section of Houston. She earned her journalism degree at elite Smith College in Massachusetts in 1965. From there she ventured to Minnesota, taking a job as a police reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.
Growing weary of the winters in the Upper Great Lakes and missing the spice of Texas food and its politics, Ms. Ivins moved to Austin to become co-editor of the Texas Observer, long considered the state’s liberal conscience.
Nadine Eckhardt, the former wife of the late Texas novelist Billy Lee Bramer and who later married former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt of Houston, said Ivins soon made herself a fixture in the Austin political and cocktail party scene in the early 1970s.
"That’s where she became the Molly Ivins as we’ve come to know her," said Eckhardt, an Ivins friend for nearly four decades. "The Observer had such wonderful writers doing such wonderful stories at the time, and Molly was always right in the middle of everything."
Her writing flair caught the attention of the New York Times, which hired her to cover city hall, then later moved her to the statehouse bureau in Albany. Later, she was assigned to the Times’ Rocky Mountain bureau in Denver.
Even though she wrote the Times’ obituary for Elvis Presley in 1977, Ms. Ivins said later that she and the sometimes stodgy Times proved to be a mismatch. In a 2002 interview with the Star-Telegram, Ms. Ivins recalled that she would write about something that "squawked like a $2 fiddle" only to have a Times editor rewrite it to say "as an inexpensive instrument." Ms Ivins said she would mention a "beer belly" and The Times would substitute "a protuberant abdomen.”
So Ms. Ivins returned to Austin in 1982 to become a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald and reconnecting with such political figures as Ann Richards, who would later become governor, and Bob Bullock, then the hard-drinking state comptroller who later wielded great power as lieutenant governor.
Trademark language
The column provided Ms. Ivins the freedom to express her views with the colorful language that would become her trademark. She called such figures as Ross Perot, former U.S. Sen. John Tower and ex-Gov. Bill Clements "runts with attitudes." As a candidate for governor, George W. Bush became "Shrub," a nicknamed she never tired of using.
Surprised became "womperjawed." A visibly angry person would "throw a walleyed fit."
Ms. Ivins, who was single and had no children, told readers about her first bout with cancer in a matter-of-fact afterword in an otherwise ordinary column.
"I have contracted an outstanding case of breast cancer, from which I fully intend to recover," she wrote on Dec. 14, 1999. "I don’t need get-well cards, but I would like the beloved women readers to do something for me: Go. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done."
Ms. Ivins authored three books and co-authored a fourth. She was a three-time finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and had served on Amnesty International’s Journalism Network, but the iconoclastic writer often said that her two highest honors were being banned from the conservative campus of Texas A&M University and having the Minneapolis police name their mascot pig after her when she covered the department as a reporter during one of her first jobs in the newspaper business.
Funeral arrangements were pending.
I would pay him to keep silent. "Molly who?" After all the effort she put into her columns, all of which were about Bush, the irony would be so sweet.
My thoughts exactly.
Can't be repeated often enough: Get the damn mammogram. Please.
My mother is a breast cancer survivor, but my mother in law wasn't so lucky.
Huh, how about that.
Maybe a FReeper's conspicuous absence will now reveal something.
Oh, I certainly understand about Free Republic. A grown-up just gets curious sometimes. We do respect the dead and thats good~~~~
What you said. Plus, Ann actually has real credentials -- a law degree.
I am with you on that pard.
I saw some of them. I would characterize them as dancing on the grave kind of sentiment.
Exactly. I've gone over many an FR thread about the death of a prominent lib or Dem. Despite DU myths to the contrary, I have rarely seen uncompassionate posts.
You don't know that she died without God.
Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy--meditate on these things. Phl 4:8
(From my wife.)
Ya know what, I bet ya he does make a statement of sympathy regarding her death.
He is a gentleman.
As an aside to this, I have read her columns, and I swear I am really not trying to be mean when I say she wasn't really a very good writer. Her style had a patronizing tone and she didn't seem to have a very good grasp of organization. She used awkward segues from one topic to another and multiple split infinitives. Brevity is the soul of wit, and unfortunately her wit (if any) was sapped away by long, unnecessarily complicated sentences.
Frankly, reading her columns was a chore and not just because she was a leftist and therefore not worth listening to. Perhaps her editor was a crack addict.
Cancer doesn't care what political philosophy you believe in. May both women rest in peace.
A peaceful and pain free death is rare--but cancer is truly a terrible way to pass. Rest in Peace.
Godspeed, Ms. Ivins. Have a cold one ready for Ann Richards.
"Poor George" outlived ya, though. Sorry.
The Bible is not at all ambiguous about what qualifies as Christian behavior and belief.
I can understand taking into account the possibility of a deathbed conversion; however such events are exceedingly rare. By design it would seem.
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