Thursday, February 1st, 2007...6:13 am
Molly Ivins
One of my favorite writers, Molly Ivins has died. I met her way back in 1991, when she was signing copies of Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? at a Books and Authors event over at the TCC. We ended up talking for a couple of minutes and she signed my book, “To Ted, An Arizona Freedom Fighter.”
How cool is that?
She was full of little stories about Texas politics, but my favorite of her stories was one she told about herself. She was hired by the New York Times and became its Rocky Mountain bureau chief. It was only a matter of time before the feisty Ivins would run into trouble with the normally formal Times, and this came to a head when she described a chicken plucking contest as a “gang pluck.” Her description of the argument with her editor over this was priceless. Needless to say, she left the Times shortly thereafter.
I remember the Today Show dragging her out shortly after Gennifer Flowers’s press conference on the eve of the New Hampshire Primary back in 1991. She looked like they had dragged her out of bed (with the time difference, it’s very possible) and she showed her displeasure that this silliness was crowding out actual coverage of the presidential race. “Why don’t they just ask her how big it was?” she asked Katie Couric. Had those prop coffee mugs had anything in them, Couric would have done a spit take right there.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has a tribute to Ivins here. The Houston Chronicle has a list of quotes here.
I also caught an odd tribute. For a few hours yesterday, Wikipedia said that her death was the result of a shark bite. Not knockdown funny, but it was exactly the sort of thing that Ivins would have run with and made a funny paragraph or two out of.
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