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.
Maybe while she suffered from cancer, she sought her Maker and His forgiveness, but I too, doubt it. We will not know, and it isn't up to us to judge. Our job, our commission, is to preach His name to everyone we meet. The Holy Spirit is the One responsible for giving the gift of faith and belief. The thief on the cross did nothing righteous in his whole life, but found salvation nailed to a cross. You don't have to do good works to be saved, but you must believe before your last breath. If you are still referring to the Lord of the universe as "the man upstairs", you probably haven't been "born again". There are many people that don't want to be considered an atheist, but don't want to be "one of those wacko fundamentalist's" either. When you are "born again" you can't help being a fundamentalist, extremist, radical, because that's what Jesus is, and His Spirit lives in us.
What always bugs me when something like this happens is that someone always has to "remind" us to be nice. I am not criticizing the person who said it here today, but it bothers me that it even has to be said.
RIP and the less said, the better.
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Nuff said.
"Trademark language"
Ask Florence King about Ivins' "trademark language".
I'm trying to come up with something nice to say here but words fail me....
"She died of breast cancer this past week."
I believe she died of stomach cancer, which is equally horrible of course. Their are several mentions of her on this site.
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/in_memoriam/default.asp
She used to write a column with Tom Barberi in the Salt Lake Tribune where they would both give their opinions on some topic that was picked for them by the editor. Talk about a meeting of the minds--not. KALL 910 radio ran Tom off after being a fixture on that radio station for 30 years because all he did was bash Bush and embrace every nutcase 911 theorist who said that the U.S. govt. staged it all. We all know Molly's illustrious career. She's further proof that anybody can be a liberal columnist.
Can't say it better than that.
I think she was a dishonest woman.
Rest in peace Molly, but I won't be sorry to see you go.
Like someone said earlier, after a while, I couldn't stand to read her anymore, but may she rest in peace.
My mother died of cancer--the "treatment" (chemo, radiation) is almost worse than the disease.
I thought she was funny! But then it got old, too much, too over the top, too hateful and I stopped liking her. I think she was in her prime in the Clinton years. She caught BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) early on and lost her sense of humor. RIP. My Mom loved her work. We used to laugh and laugh. I actually thought Shrub (little Bush) was very clever.
We found out all we needed to know about FR and DU when Eilzabeth Edwards and Laura Ingraham were both diagnosed with cancer. The FR thread was pretty much a prayer thread; the only prayers in the DU thread were prayers for Ingraham to die horribly.
Rest in peace Molly, but I won't be sorry to see you go.
There was a news clip on the 6 AM news here in Austin today. The clip said she was a writer / editorial writer who had a humorous side in every article she wrote. That's like saying ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., are conservative news networks.
She may have well started every column she ever wrote with "I hate Republicans" and the past 6 + years, "I HATE George W. Bush." Some of the evil bile she wrote should have been treated as hate speech, but the DBM would never do that. The libs here in Austin just adored her.
The same daughter who's running Planned Parenthood?
So sad she suffered from breast cancer. Her journalistic cousin Linda Ellerbee who worked at NBC and does news programs on Nickelodeon also has had to battle that disease along with alcoholism. Ellerbee acknowledged having an abortion, too.
Is there a link between the three (breast cancer, abortion, alcoholism)? I don't fully know but the strongly pro-choice and twice married Betty Ford (militantly pro-choice)dealt with breast cancer and alcoholism.
I sense the three are linked and hope that no more women will have to follow a life path with those three things linked.
Prayers for her family.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
I read her first book, and one of the columns, although written in the third person, was very obviously about herself and the fiance she lost in Vietnam. It was so painful to read that I've never been able to be really angry with her, no matter how much I disagreed with what she wrote. RIP, hope you've been reunited.
Go Colts!
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