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he died, having lived a good life, but it was nowhere nearly long enough. She learned to talk Texan when her family moved to Houston but then, when it came time to go to college, she went to Smith College and Columbia University grad school. Over a couple of decades I had the good fortune to speak with her on radio on many an occasion. She'd do "the book tour" to publicize her books; all "bidness". She always returned home because "home is where you understand the sumbitches". (As she pointed out frequently, they are not to be confused with S.O.Bs, "sumbitches are just regular guys"). She claimed emphatically that her fashion goddess was Attorney General Janet Reno. Like Ms. Reno ,Molly was unmarried and, as she claimed, while puffing on a Marlboro, (in those days we had ashtrays in radio studios), "I'm big. I work hard. I'll never be cute. I want to be comfortable." She could be deadly serious, and simultaneously extremely funny. Her first book was titled "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" That book was a best seller for a full year, Underlying everything was a serious devotion to politics and to every word of the Declaration of Independence. I read that she was able to recite it by heart. I remember asking her whether she had any personal heroes and the one she mentioned was Sam Houston. Why? Because she said "I love him most for what he hated; snobbery. hypocrisy, bigotry, pomposity and injustice." She described President Bush as "My man George Bush whose preppy dweeb personality has offered a vision of goofiness for decades". It was she who dubbed President George Bush as "Shrub Bush." An excerpt from one of her many books; Nothin' But Good Times Ahead".: "Among reasons to love America, I love our national habit of polling ourselves to find out how ignorant we are and our subsequent fits of mortification when we all slap our respective foreheads in alarm because the latest poll shows 62.7 percent of us believe Alexis de Tocqueville never should have divorced Blake Carrington."
Molly, thank you for being there - a Texas liberal par excellence.