Molly Ivins did say that, didn’t she?
Highlights from her Observer years
Issues such as abortion, race relations, equality and social justice often evoked Molly’s most passionate and forceful writing.
‘This right of privacy’
Feb. 16, 1973
Austin -- The decision came down the day Lyndon Johnson died and the impending peace in Vietnam topped even that story. It was not what you call your slow news day, so the impact was muted. But it was not just the timing—even those who have fought for, worked for and believed most deeply in the reform of our abortion laws did not feel like celebrating. There was one report of a party in the San Francisco office of the National Organization of Women, but for many feminists it just didn’t seem like a champagne occasion. It was a little like the end of the war—more relief than joy. Sarah Weddington said calmly that she was “pleased, very pleased.” She is the Texas lawyer who won the case.
One way to look at the struggle over abortion is the journalist’s way, sifting slowly through the clips, most of them yellow and brittle with age. Story after story is added to the big heap—the legal maneuverings year after year; the legislative reform efforts year after year; the obligatory “balanced” series from the women’s sections, some good, some poor; the case histories, all that terror and misery reduced to the 10 inches of type; the brief death notices; the statistics stories, the opinion polls; the gory ads from the Right to Life groups; the Catholic papers, arguing again and again that their position is not based on religious doctrine; doctors under indictment; the Florida woman convicted of manslaughter because she got an abortion; the slow changes, the medical association votes in favor of reform, the mental health organization votes in favor of reform, a legislator speaks out, a good government group; more deaths, more statistics, more polls.
ABORTION HAS been one of the messiest issues. Issues get to be messy not because reasonable folk disagree about them, but because irrational emotionalism infects them. And during the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years of public discussion of abortion, both sides have always seen the question, finally, as one of Right Against Wrong. This has been true of the abortion debate to a far greater extent than it is of public debates on such simple topics as defense posture, welfare reform, campaign spending and the like. For example, who could ever forget the Solid Rock League? For those of you who have never had a chance to forget them, it should be noted that the Solid Rock League of Women of Houston is against genocide or child slaughter. The Solid Rockers also oppose common-law marriages for teenagers, pornography and “the taking away of religious freedom while atheism is being allowed in the schools.” (One of the chief Solid Rockers once went to Pacifica radio station in Houston to tape a discussion program. She appeared accompanied by two hired male bodyguards, one of whom sported a Canadian Mounties-type outfit with both a gun and a hunting knife in his belt. While the Rocker was doing the program the Mounty confided to a Pacifica staffer, “This isn’t the strangest assignment I’ve ever had: I was once asked to guard a barrel of pickles for 24 hours.”)
What between all those aborted feti dumped into buckets whilst still alive and all those 14-year-old girls with rusty hangers stuck up ‘em, anyone who kept his head clearly did not understand the situation.
Fortunately, perhaps, for all of us, abortion eventually came down to a question not of Right or Wrong but merely whether it was constitutional. The decision was seven to two out of the Nixon Court, which reassures everyone except those who now want to excommunicate Justice Brennan and hang the other six. Right to Life! The Court’s decision was based on (God bless us) Texas law. The case is styled Roe v. Wade.
About that ‘lynching’
Oct. 16, 1970
Early in the morning of July 12, 1970, the body of Conrad D. Rogers, 31, a black man, was discovered on Farm Rd. 993 seven miles southeast of Pittsburg, Texas.
Both his legs were broken, his guts were turn up, the lower portion of his face was missing, his genitals were later found several yards away, his skull was cracked, one arm was damaged, and all the fingers of one hand broken. There was very little blood at the scene and no trace of broken glass or strips of chrome, as might be expected had Rogers been hit by a car. Rogers is listed in the Camp County Courthouse as a pedestrian fatality.
The black citizens of Pittsburg, about 35% of the population, seem to believe to a man that Rogers was murdered. His father Leonard Rogers believes it. Black investigators sent to Pittsburg by both the NAACP and the SCLC believe it. C.L. Bolton believes it. And C.L. Bolton is not your average outside agitator. He is a worker, a preacher, and a member of the Pittsburg school board. Even the man at the Pittsburg Gazette said of the Bolton family, “They’re a good bunch of niggers.”
Nevertheless, it is both plausible and probable that Conrad Rogers was the victim of a hit and run driver.
L.E. Bell, Jr., Camp County attorney, describes himself as a doubting Thomas. And when he first saw Rogers’ body in the Johnson Funeral Home that Sunday morning he grimly concluded that Rogers was the victim of a particularly vicious axe murder. “I called Doc Pendergrass to come down right away,” Bell said, “cause I figured I’d need his testimony if I was going to try this axe murdered. Well, when he told me he thought Rogers had been hit by a car, I told him he’d have to prove that to me. And he did, to my satisfaction. I’ve been over and over it and I don’t see any other explanation.”
R.K. Pendergrass is a general practitioner and surgeon who also serves as the county medical officer. He reminds people that he is not a criminal pathologist and no formal autopsy was performed on Rogers. Autopsies are extremely rare in Camp County. Pendergrass is ready to stand on his judgment that Rogers died from a hit and run accident.
The evidence supporting Pendergrass’ decision lies in the fact that Rogers was struck twice that night. What hit him the first time is a mystery. According to Pendergrass, it was a motor vehicle going at a high rate of speed. According to Bell, it must have been something like a cement truck or some vehicle with some kind of all-metal front attachment—tractor?—tow truck?—some front end that would not leave shattered glass on impact. There are medical reasons for the fact that Rogers bled so little.
About the second vehicle there is no mystery. A 17-year-old Pittsburg boy drove his girl friend home from a dance a little after midnight on the 12th and saw nothing on Farm Road 993 on his way to her house. On his way back, about 45 minutes later, he saw something in the road (he thought it might be a bundle of papers) and tried to straddle it with his car. He hit it hard enough to go back and check on what it was. On glimpsing Rogers’ body, he went home for help and the town’s constable was called.
Department of Public Safety officers have checked the boy’s car and found no evidence that it caused Rogers’ death—there were no marks on the front of the car. However, they did find bits of flesh and some pubic hair on the undercarriage of the car, indicating that the boy’s car had further mutilated the body.
The case is now with the D.P.S., which has not been able to get a trace on any vehicle damaged as one that struck Rogers might be, despite extensive checking with repair shops in the area. Bell is fully prepared to prosecute the driver of such a vehicle should he be found.
There are still some questions: What would something like a cement truck be doing barreling down 993 after midnight? But the questions that arise if Pendergrass’ judgment is not accepted are even more confusing and give rise to even less likely scenarios.
Meanwhile, rumors continue to run rife in the black community of Pittsburg . . . rumors that Rogers’ genitals were found in a sack, that there was a gunshot wound in the back of his head, that his clothes were in a bunch stuck into his stomach cavity. None of them are true.
The separation and alienation between races in Pittsburg are not so terrible that a black man could have been murdered there with official connivance in covering it up. They are just great enough that no one in authority seems to have considered telling the black people of Pittsburg just what has been discovered about Rogers’ death.
Leonard Rogers said gently, “You know, I’m just a colored man. I ain’t got no colored friends that can help me, defend me. A white man gets in trouble, and they all come, the whole shoot ‘n push. Now that sheriff, I thought he was my friend. I worked for him, you know, to get out the votes for him, but it looks like he’s done forgot me.” The sheriff has in fact been in the hospital after a serious operation.
Bell is also something of a friend of Leonard Rogers. “Oh, he gets busted every now and then for bootleggin’ and gets a fine, but it’s not personal between us. You might call it a business risk for him. We’ve always gotten along well. We get along fine. If he believes all these rumors . . . I can’t understand why he hasn’t come in to see me.”
The Joe Louis Addition
Dec. 25, 1970
The Joe Louis Addition is a tiny, all-black section on the Trinity River bottoms in the city of Fort Worth. The people who live there pay taxes to the city of Fort Worth.
There are no city water lines in Joe Louis, nor are there sewer lines. The streets are not paved, the garbage is not collected, the rats are not exterminated. The children of Joe Louis do not go to school in Fort Worth. There is no public transportation anywhere near the area. Neither the housing code nor the health code is enforced.
The homes in Joe Louis are hopelessly substandard, but the city’s housing inspectors have mercifully failed to condemn them and evict their owners. Mercifully, because there is no place the residents of the Joe Louis Addition can go. There is no decent housing for poor people in Fort Worth—none available and none being built.
Mrs. Imogene Smith has lived in Joe Louis since 1948, when there were only four houses in the area. She saw the community grow until there were about 200 people living there. It was a shanty town on the edge of the city then, the kind of ghetto where poor folks go because they can’t afford running water or indoor toilets.
“All these houses round here were filled up,” said Mrs. Smith, gesturing toward the empty, decayed shacks around her. “We had a lovely community, really. But some of ‘em lost their houses through fallin’ behind in their payments. Others were able to move on to better places and some, you know, had to move for the conveniences. You can’t get the bus here.”
Now there are between 7 and 11 families living in Joe Louis, about 20 people in all. The city has posted the houses as they have become vacant and about 15 of them have been razed. But no one has come to clear off the rubble. The rats have lots of places to hide.
Joe Louis is bounded on one side by auto junkyards and on the other by the Estes Dump, Co. and incinerator. The outhouses tilt drunkenly and seem to stagger prepatory to falling down entirely. Flies and roaches infest them. There is one street light in Joe Louis and two tiny churches. One outdoor, cold-water faucet provides all the water for three families. Broken glass, old tires and all manner of junk litters the edges of small plots where the razed houses remain in heaps.
Years ago the Joe Louis Addition was called the Garden of Eden.
Despite the squalor around them, several of the remaining residents of Joe Louis keep their property quite neatly. Joe Brown’s house at 5812 Estie boasts a well-trimmed lawn of St. Augustine grass and a large, fenced garden in the sideyard. On the other side of his home only a cyclone fence stands between his property and a sea of wrecked, rusted cars that extends for a good half-mile.
The 1973 gun control editorial
March 2, 1973
Austin -- Lay-deez and Gentlemen! It is, it is, it’s true, it’s here, it’s time again for the Observer’s glorious, festive, bi-annual Gun Control Editorial! Whoopee! Huzzah, huzzah! All stand and cheer. Calliopes, parades.
Here we are again, back for another crack at the old Legislature and welcome again to all you old dudes and to all you new dudes in the 663rd. Undeterred by proof positive of our perennial inefficacy, undiscouraged, tourjours gai, we are once again advocating — gun control.
Now, for iteration’s sake, let us again remind you that the only limitations placed by state law on the purchase of firearms are that the purchaser be 18 or over and sober. In Texas, it is legal for an infuriated drunk to buy a gun, provided a salesclerk with a financial motive thinks the drunk is not (too) intoxicated. In Texas, it is legal for a blind person to buy and use a gun (it has happened, folks, it has happened). In Texas, it is legal for a convicted felon, convicted two or seven or X times over, to buy a gun. In Texas, it is legal for a certified lunatic to buy a gun.
On the philosophy front, we are still operating on the simple-minded but cheerful theory that if people didn’t have guns, they wouldn’t shoot one another so much. We once again, unashamed of being repetitious, remind you that 85 percent of all murders occur within families or between friends. There is a fight. There is a gun. Someone uses it. That’s 85 percent of all murders. (“Oh, God, I didn’t mean to do it. Oh, God, I didn’t mean to do it. He was my son. I only meant to scare him. I only meant to scare him. Oh, God, I didn’t mean to do it. Oh please, dear God, he was my only son!” – a 50-year-old Minneapolis machinist, in a police station, after having shot and killed his 17-year-old boy.)
On the progress front, J. Edgar Hoover died and his acting successor as head of the FBI Patrick Gray actually believes in gun control. No pussyfooting. He is deadset against handguns and says, “They ought to be banned totally, completely and thoroughly.” He also said that firearms have been used in so many murders that we should try to control them. He doubts they can be banned completely but urges control, including the licensing and registration of all firearms. The head of the FBI. O frabjous day.
11-year-old sentenced
March 26, 1976
Austin -- Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Ann White of Corsicana finally got out of the Navarro Country Jail after two and a half months: she was shipped off to the Texas Youth Council’s facility at Brownwood.
On Feb. 25, an all-white jury found the adjudicated delinquent, as they say in the ol’ Texas Family Code, and left to the discretion of Juvenile Judge Don Nicholson.
Elizabeth and another girl were charged with breaking into an apartment and stealing some objects therefrom. The other girl apparently will not face charges. Elizabeth claims the other girl told her they were just going into the other girl’s aunt’s place to get some things her aunt wanted.
“I tried,” said Don Pevehouse, Elizabeth’s court-appointed attorney. “It upset me tremendously. I did everything I could. If it hadn’t been for the confession . . . I’m so happy the Civil Liberties Union has picked up this case.”
The TCLU, you see, does not think highly of Elizabeth’s confession, which the state claims was made “knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily.” Elizabeth did not have an attorney when she signed a statement she says was written by a justice of the peace out of the presence of the juvenile office. J.P. W.H. Tipton said he read the 11-year-old her rights and presumed she understood them. She said he didn’t.
(Kid,yagottherighttoremainsilentandnotmakeanystatementatallan-
danystatementyamakemaybeusedinevidenceagainstya, understand?)
The TCLU, which has filed a motion for a new trial in the case, claims that the circumstances under which Elizabeth waived her Fifth Amendment rights constitute coercion and that her statement should not have been admitted at the trial.
The TCLU motion further argues that sending Elizabeth to the TYC constituted cruel and unusual punishment in that she was offered none of the following alternatives: (1) probation (2) confinement in a half-way house, (3) release her to a guardian ad litem, the Rev. Paul Curry, and her relatives.
Now there are interesting alternatives. (2) the half-way house is out because Corsicana doesn’t have a half-way house and isn’t likely to get one soon, since, as readers of the March 12 Observer will recall, Gov. Dolph Briscoe is sitting on the TYC funds for same. (No new taxes!) Pevehouse argued that Elizabeth should be released to the Reverend Curry and her family, specifically her grandmother and an aunt both of whom had offered to take her in. Elizabeth’s mother had been hospitalized for some time after an industrial accident at the Texas Miller Hat Factory in which both her arms were crushed by a machine.
Judge Nicholson seemed to be puzzled as to how he could put the child on probation and release her to her family. We quote the Corsicana Daily Sun: “Nicholson asked Pevehouse to suggest some conditions for this probation that are ‘enforceable by law.’ Pevehouse, noticeably surprised by the request, first asked for clarification of the request and then wondered aloud if Nicholson meant he couldn’t probate the case.
“Nicholson, his voice raising, responded that he wanted Pevehouse to “state for me” some legal conditions `I can place in this case. . . .If you’d like to sit down and think about it a while, I suggest you do.’
“Pevehouse, remaining afoot, speculated on specifying that Miss White stay in school and that she be home after certain hours, a response that brought a quick retort from Nicholson. The judge wondered if it is a violation of the law for a child to be on the streets after a certain time. This prompted Pevehouse to wonder if Nicholson were ‘saying there is no way to enforce probation,’ the Sun continued.
“During this exchange, Nicholson demonstrably counted off the probation terms as Pevehouse suggested them, pulling one finger up at a time while grilling the attorney as to the points’ legalities.... Nicholson continue to question Pevehouse whose demeanor vacillated between amusement and anger during the exchange . . . But then, with a quick snap of his head, the judge stopped, apologized to Pevehouse and said that `perhaps’ his questions had been inappropriate.”
Perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps there is no way to enforce juvenile probation in Corsicana. The $2 million of TYC money Briscoe is holding up was to have been used in part to expand juvenile probation services. Or perhaps the judge is still convinced, as he told The Dallas Morning News in February, that certain persons are agitating about the case.
The TCLU is further outraged by the fact that from Dec. 19 to Feb. 26, Elizabeth remained in the Navarro Country Jail, which is about as long as some folks convicted of rather serious offenses spend in the clink. There was nothing illegal about her incarceration: a portion of the jail has been rechristened the Juvenile Detention Facility and thus Elizabeth was held in juvenile detention and not a jail, even though it was the jail, you see.
The TLCU filed its motion for a new trail on March 4: the judge has 45 days to respond.