A Texas Observer editor, a writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the New York Times, an author or co-author of more than 10 books and one of the last true Yellow-Dog Democrat women of Texas, Molly Ivins was more than just a journalist. She was an icon and an inspiration.
She lost her battle with breast cancer Wednesday at the age of 62.
"I was a public school teacher for many years," said political author Lou Dubose. "As a middle-aged man looking for a new career, I decided I want to be Molly Ivins. I wanted to be that woman."
Dubose, who has since co-written two books with Ivins, became a journalist in the first place because of her.
"I learned to write by reading Molly," Dubose said.
Dubose said Ivins showed him that there was another way to do journalism, a fearless and funny way. Dubose remembers Ivins as a woman who could stand up to the big guys and give hope to the little ones.
Ivins went to high school in Houston, college at Smith and got her master's degree in journalism at Columbia University.
"We really are lucky to have so many strong women in Texas," said author and journalist Liz Carpenter.
As fellow political commentator Carpenter will tell you, from day one, Ivins was not just a female political reporter, but a female political reporter with an opinion.
"You have only to cover the Texas Legislature to learn yourself who is for the people and who is for the corporate types," Carpenter said. "After you'd been covering these events all day, you'd go to some bar and then have the fun of talking about the people you'd been covering and ridiculing them. She was very good at that."
There's no doubt, whether or not you agreed with her politics or her opinions, that Ivins taught Texas a thing or two with humor and wit.
"Every state needs to have a Molly Ivins," Dubose said. "And, I think that she left in her wake, the creation of more here because she was so admired."
"She was just this perfect, universal journalist from Texas," Dubose said. "I think she was the best."
Below are some quotes from Molly Ivins, the liberal political writer whose words could be clever, ruthless and humorous -- sometimes in the same sentence. (Quotes provided by Associated Press.)
--"I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person," she told the San Antonio Express-News in September 2006, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Gov. Ann Richards.
-- "If you think his daddy had trouble with 'the vision thing,' wait'll you meet this one," Ivins on George W. Bush in "The Progressive," June 1999.
-- "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili," on Bill Clinton, from the introduction to "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You"
--"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?", in a 2002 column about a California political race.
-- "The poor man who is currently our president has reached such a point of befuddlement that he thinks stem cell research is the same as taking human lives, but that 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians are progress toward democracy," from a July 2006 column urging commentator Bill Moyers to run for president.
-- "Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech; it probably sounded better in the original German," Ivins in September 1992, commenting on the one-time presidential hopeful's speech to the Republican National Convention.
-- "I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults," from a March 1992 column.
-- "I love Texas, but it is a nasty, old rawhide mother in the way it bears down on the people who have the fewest defenses," Ivins wrote in September 2002.
-- "....our very own dreaded Legislature is almost upon us. Jan. 9 and they'll all be here, leaving many a village without its idiot," from a December 2000 column.
