joanna
ThatRogersWoman wrote:
>Molly Ivins facing third round of cancer
>Nigh hairless, not hopeless, Austin writer won't let disease keep her
>quiet.
>By W. Gardner Selby
>AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN Friday, January 27, 2006
>
>Molly Ivins, battling breast cancer afresh, sounds as feisty as ever.
>
>The South Austin resident continues writing her left-of-center
>column, raising money for the journal where she forged her tart take
>on politics and, of course, cheerfully gigging Republicans such as
>the well-coifed governor of Texas.
>
>Ivins, 61, tongue-in-cheeked that Gov. Rick Perry's trip to Iraq this
>week will slow anti-American insurgents. "The mere sight of his hair
>will do a world of good," she said.
>
>She chatted with two visitors to her home office in Travis Heights
>without donning her wig of reddish-blond locks; her pate was nearly
>bald.
>
>The California native, who grew up in the tony River Oaks section of
>Houston, fielded her latest (and third) cancer diagnosis around
>Thanksgiving. Surely she could be excused for feeling sorry for
>herself or slowing down.
>
>"Actually," she said, "I feel pretty good." Renewed chemotherapy
>appears to be helping.
>
>Ivins has all but forbidden gifts of food and other items. She was
>overwhelmed with well-intended advice and goodies after she wrote of
>her initial diagnosis of breast cancer in 1999. The outpouring kept
>her from telling readers of the recurrences in 2003 and two months
>ago, her assistant, Betsy Moon, said.
>
>Lately, Ivins has urged friends and fans to give instead to The Texas
>Observer, a liberal biweekly of politics and literature run on a
>shoestring for 51 years. Ivins, co-editor with Kaye Northcott from
>1970 to 1976, even let the magazine put her face on a $10 gourmet
>chocolate bar available online and at the magazine's ramshackle
>Austin office.
>
>At a recent Observer fundraiser, Ivins prankishly yanked off a hat to
>reveal her nearly hairless dome. She pleaded guilty to "shameless
>exploitation of sympathy for cancer. We might as well do something
>useful because God knows I don't need another casserole."
>
>Ever a quipster (once trading opinionated barbs weekly on CBS-TV's
>"60 Minutes"), Ivins remains a spring of saucy invective on behalf of
>the oft-defeated left wing of American politics. She persists, too,
>in provoking conservatives who sometimes dismiss her as an
>ill-informed critic who still (goldang it) writes well.
>
>Little has deterred the former cub reporter for the Houston
>Chronicle. A graduate of Smith College and the Columbia University
>Graduate School of Journalism, she also reported for the Minneapolis
>Tribune, the Observer and The New York Times before becoming a
>columnist starting in the early 1980s at the (now-defunct) Dallas
>Times Herald.
>
>Nearly 400 newspapers, including the Austin American-Statesman
>subscribe to her twice-weekly column. Ivins isn't giving in.
>
>"Maybe this is false bravado," she said. "In some ways for me, this
>is like having a manageable disease. It's like diabetes. It doesn't
>mean it's not going to come get me in the end."
>
>Ivins, never married, said she's divided charitable bequests in her
>will between the American Civil Liberties Union, which she credits
>with defending the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, and her
>cherished Observer.
>
>In her career, she said, she's watched daily newspapers excel and
>expand thanks to head-to-head competition and then, after many
>folded, leash spending on hard-to-get stories and shrink, becoming
>less vital. But she has hope for the Internet as a venue for
>investigative reporting.
>
>Publications like the Observer are pivotal, she said. "Unless we keep
>these little independents alive, we're going to lose the whole thing,
>the whole idea of public-interest journalism."
>
>http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/01/27ivins.html?imw=Y
>
>
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