Molly Ivins did say that, didn’t she?
Highlights from her Observer years
As she left to to join The New York Times in 1976, Molly penned her final column as Observer co-editor.
Ivins says goodbye
June 18, 1976
I forget which of the Observer’s critics once sneeringly remarked that on the occasion of Willie Morris’ leaving this paper, Dugger went and printed a dreadfully sentimental letter Willie had left for his friends at Scholz Garten. The minute I knew I was leaving, I searched frantically through all the late 1962 issues looking for that letter. With my own options ranging from maudlin to bathetic, I figured copying Willie was the only hope I had of getting out with mere sentimentality. But I couldn’t find the damn thing.
I was about to sink into total immobility as a result of depression over leaving when, most fortuitously, we got a cussing in the mail from Arch Fullingim. Now if Ralph Yarborough would just call and chew me out for all my sins, then I could wander on down to Scholz’s and have Dave Shaprio, Martin Wigginton, or J. Stanley Walker tell me what a lousy magazine we’ve been putting out for six years. Then the 9,999th UT student I’ve never met before would come up and start by saying, “The trouble with the Observer....” And then maybe I could think of some reason for wanting to leave.
But it’s no use. If I go down to Scholz’s, a bunch of my friends will be there, and they’ll play “Fraulein” on the jukebox and someone will start a good story, and I’ll want to stay in Texas forever and ever.
Six years. I suppose that in my old age, assuming I get that far, I’ll remember nothing but sunlight and laughter. But I’ve always wanted to tell the 9,999 people who know what’s wrong with the Observer what putting out this paper is really like. Shapiro, always rightly (Shapiro is always right: it’s so tedious of him), is prone to note that whatever liberal hero we have recently eulogized in the Observer actually voted against Yarborough in 1952 or against Henry Wallace in ‘48 or some damn thing. Walker and his companion in crime, Fletcher Boone, are wont to accuse us of being insufficiently sensitive to the decline of civilization. Wigginton is apt to be mournful about our failure to regularly indict capitalist imperialism in all its sundry corporate greedhead forms.
Me, I always think of the Great Chicken Crisis. We were at the printer’s one day (we are always at the printer’s and it is always deadline time), and we had a dandy article about water pollution. We wanted to run one of those moving photographs of a seagull drowning in an oil spill to illustrate the article. We have all seen a thousand photos of seagulls drowned in oil spills, right? For the life of us, we could not find a picture of a seagull drowning in an oil spill. Not even at the Austin Public Library, an institution second only to Cliff Olofson in the on-going life of the Observer, could come up with a seagull drowned in an oil spill. So we ran a picture of a chicken drowned in a flood. That’s what putting out the Observer is like. When you can’t get a seagull in an oil spill, you run a chicken drowned in a flood.
We put out this paper by the seat of our skirts. The enterprise may be the oldest permanently established floating craps game in the state. I don’t know how many lectures I have given at journalism schools in and out of state. A bunch. I recently delivered a weighty address at my alma mater, Columbia University School of Journalism. I said a lot of heavy stuff about the Profession of Journalism. What a fraud. My friend and teacher John Hohenberg used to say, “You gotta go with what you got.” We just go with what we can get.
If it weren’t for Ronnie Dugger and Kaye Northcott, I would have run amok long ago. Last week, I almost had K.N. talked into letting me write a headline on a letter-to-the-editor. Some geek wrote in cancelling his subscription because we keep promoting gun control. I wanted to call it, “Gun nut cancels--good riddance.” Cooler heads prevailed. Which reminds me of the time we had an article about the end of the death penalty--would the electric chair ever be used again? We almost called it, “Whither Reddy Killowatt?”
I don’t know how I got off on telling Observer stories. I meant to say good-bye. I’m going off to join The New York Times, you see. (This is called “burying the news.”) I want to say something to those kind souls who have asked me not to leave. One of the joys of taking two years to clear out is that people keep begging you not to go (or else holding their wretched breaths in anticipation). “Whatever will the Observer do without you?” some sweet folks have asked. Look, folks, the Observer is going to be just fine without me.
I think our readers get hooked on certain editors out of simple habit. I had worked for the Observer for more than two years before we got one single letter-to-the-editor praising anything I had written. (I shall never forget that frabjous day: “Keep Moll Ivins on your staff,” wrote the preternaturally percipient reader.) In the meantime, we had been receiving an endless stream of gripes about how the Observer had declined since Dugger’s day, since Willie left, since Greg and Sherrill and Brammer and Jones and the Larrys wrote for it. I confidently expect that whatever poor s.o.b. succeeds me will be subjected to at least two years of moaning about how the Observer has decayed since my departure. And I will love every minute of it. But the Observer itself will be just fine.
If I had to draw up a balance sheet for these six years--well, of course, I have failed. Assume, for a depressing moment, that this will be my last shot at alternative journalism. Why then, of course, I have failed. The best and the worst that can be said of my performance is that I have laughed too much. For those who don’t think there can be too much laughter, I’ll bet you otherwise. The anger of an Izzy Stone or a Ronnie Dugger is by far more valuable. God knows, I have never had the madness of the brave. (Gorky, folks, a very classy allusion.) On the other hand (he had a wart), I have long suspected that romantic jerks are responsible for a not inconsiderable portion of this world’s evil.
I used to say, having once been a card-carrying Sixties radical, that if I had to be called a liberal, I’d just as soon be the worst kind of liberal--a bleeding heart. I wound up being a liberal because I was for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam and that’s what I got called. I missed the New Deal and McCarthyism and all that good business.
I’ve got more important things to worry about--three-year-old kids getting raped and denied admission to a hospital because their mamas don’t have any money and things like that. I carry neither brief nor guilt for the many sins of liberals past and present: there’s too much to bleed over. And laugh over.
I suppose I have become less ideological. I hold that it has done me no harm, in the course of my growing up, to come to enjoy the likes of Bill Heatly, Jim Nugent, and Ray Hutchison. But I hope I shall never, as Another Texas Magazine did recently, judge politicians solely according to their effectiveness. Effective to what end?
After considerable pondering, I have concluded that the best single day Texas has had in the past six years was August 31, 1973, the day Judge William Wayne Justice handed down his restraining order against the Texas Youth Council. No more gassing, beating, censoring, segregating, depriving kids of medical care, punishing chicano kids for speaking Spanish, and on and on and on. All the legislative investigative committees the inspections by solons, the endless exposes in the Observer never accomplished one-tenth that much. When I told Dugger about my conclusion, he reminded me why Wayne Justice is on the bench. Because Frankie Randolph and all that splendid crew worked like mules for years setting up a political organization and fighting for change and getting Ralph Yarborough elected. And then Yarborough got Justice appointed. And that’s why they don’t beat kids in TYC schools anymore. And that’s why we have to keep on keeping on.
Well, so much for my hortatory effort. I’m afraid Texas is going through something like the Eisenhower years. There’s bland, nebby Briscoe at the helm, not doing much, very little seems to be happening, and all the time the military-industrial complex is getting bigger and bigger. But instead of getting bored or discouraged, I hope Texas progressives use this time and their energy to start building small bases. It’s Local Level time.
And for me, it’s leaving time. I have a grandly dramatic vision of myself stalking through the canyons of the Big Apple in the rain and cold, dreaming about driving with the soft night air of East Texas rushing on my face while Willie Nelson sings softly on the radio, or about blasting through the Panhandle under a fierce sun and pale blue sky, laughing at Clarence Zugenbuler’s stock report. I’ll remember. I’ll remember the way the printer’s feels at 4 a.m. What it’s like to read The Dallas Morning News editorial page. Sunsets, rivers, hills, plains, the Gulf, woods, a thousand beers in a thousand joints, and sunshine and laughter. And people. Mostly I’ll remember people.
There is one thing, an important thing, I have to tell you before I go. What I’m going to tell you is more than a fact. It is a Truth. I have spent six years checking it out, and I know it to be true. The people who subscribe to The Texas Observer are good people. In fact, you’re the best people in this state. I don’t care if you think that’s pretentious or sentimental--it’s just true.
If I got to naming you, I would never stop, so I won’t. But please believe that all of you whom I know and many of you whom I know only by letter are in my mind as I write this--even if I do forget your names half the time. Always excepting, of course, the turkey who sends me hate mail after my annual gun-control editorial. Turkey, turkey, turkey.
I wanted to call this “The Long Goodbye,” but Kaye wouldn’t let me. She wanted to call it,” Ivins Indulges in Horrible Fit of Sentimentality.”
I love you. Goodbye, my friends. MI.