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.
Imagine to think that the last 10 years of your life were built around hating and attacking George W. Bush...sad.
I am always curious as to what the comments were? Hey, we could have a graveyard thread saying "Thread for removed comments" .....'tongue in cheek naturally'>
Thanks, maybe the reason that I didn't find it was that I had misspelled her name.
Molly Ivins and Ann Richards die within a short time of each other....
LOL! Thank you. I hope the mails aren't too fiery. They did say "hold your tounge if you don't have anything good to say." Better than the DUnatics.
You're skating on thin ice, keep it up and you're out of here.
I will say nothing unkind other than to say I hope she now realizes a life built around hating a president and conservatives was a life ill-spent. Knowing that may she RIP.
The removed replies were not the type of comments we want FR to be noticed for.
DU has a well earned reputation of being particularly foulmouthed and disrespectful of the dead. We will not stoop to that level
Most of them (comments) were perfectly fine yesterday. No one would have batted an eyelash.
But now that she's dead.... we all have to pretend we are paying our respects to her.
I somewhat agree, I may think ill of Ivins, but I don't necessarily have to speak my mind.
Ditto!
RIP, Molly.
I will miss NY Post columinist DEBORAH ORIN who died of cancer this past week.
LOL! Dunno, assuming she was "innocent" in her misguided point of view, her re-education camp may take a long time. Fortunately, there's an eternity available for her to consider some "options"....
I hope her final thoughts were happy and peaceful, and that she was welcomed into the arms of Jesus. RIP.
She was as mean-spirited as it is claimed Ann Coulter is by the same type of media punks as the one quoted above, yet being a liberal and fellow Bush hater as the rest of the media gets her writing labeled "magical" by the MSM and her turn of phrase so deft that no one could possibly be hurt by her invective, while the far more talented witicist and writer Ann Coulter is just considered a rotten benighted hag. The double standards and hypocrisy of the Alice in Wonderland media never fails to amaze me.
Sorry to hear of her passing. I hope she finds the peace she never had while on this Earth. She was a very hateful person, which is sad. RIP.
It's a shame that you have to remind some, but it's encouraging that so many more already have a sense of common decency.
LOL! Man-Haters' U....
As Molly told her female readers.."Go get the Damn Mammogram..just GO"!..
sw
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.