Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (17 page)

As the corn cooked, he'd stir and stir. By the time it was finally done, almost all of the liquid had cooked away. Only soft kernels of white corn remained, with flecks of green pepper. The centerpiece of the meal for everyone else was chicken, rubbed with garlic salt, black pepper, and paprika, dipped in buttermilk and flour and fried in lard. But the fried corn won my heart.

Mother was no slouch in the kitchen either. Especially memorable were her stuffed pork chops. Actually, they were thick fried pork chops topped with a thick slice of onion, a thick slice of tomato, and a thick slice of bell pepper into which she spooned parboiled rice. She then placed them in a tightly covered baking dish and baked them for 40 or 45 minutes. The result was a one-dish meal worthy of your best cardiovascular surgeon. Over the years, neither my brothers nor I have forgotten those dishes from childhood, and occasionally I'll make them as best as I can recall.

My father, Nathaniel, died in 1988, a year before I moved to Texas. One night at dinner after my arrival in Dallas, a friend took me to a restaurant for an introduction to Texas cooking of the relentlessly fried kind. When I saw fried corn on the menu, I thought I would burst into tears. Could it be?

I eagerly ordered a double portion. How was I to know I had ordered batter-fried chunks of corn on the cob? Somewhere, that night, I know my father was spinning in his grave. Eating healthy might be good for you, but I still can't see fat-free, low-cholesterol food-fad fanatics reminiscing over tofu casseroles or alfalfa-sprout sandwiches the way we remember Mother's pork chops, Daddy's fried corn, Aunt Jen's baked chicken, and Aunt Kay's chicken spaghetti.

MOLLY
'
S FRIENDS WERE A QUIRKY, ECLECTIC BUNCH
who came to dinner in jeans and kicked off their shoes. Their language was frequently salty, and they often made Molly double over with laughter at delicious gossip or schoolgirl silliness.

Sure, she hobnobbed with the rich and famous, but she came home to the same merry band she had known over the years: Kaye Northcott, with whom she shared legislative reporting responsibilities at the
Texas Observer
and, later, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
; Courtney Anderson; her good friend Sara Speights; Austin attorney Shelia Cheaney; and later, television news producer Marilyn Schultz, whom Molly affectionately dubbed Schultzie. I came comparatively late to the party, but they allowed me in.

Each has a tale or two to tell, from Molly's early days as a reporter to her years as a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, through her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of Sara Speights's many memories of cooking with Molly revolves around the fact that no matter what the meal was, Molly was rarely ready, especially if a Julia dish was involved.

“Molly's food was always fabulous,” Sara said. “But if I do a meal I always try to do as much as possible in advance. Not Molly. You'd arrive and she'd be working away in the kitchen, preparing some unbelievably complicated food, so we'd all be squeezing past one another to get the damn dinner done.

“Once Molly invited federal district judge William Wayne Justice, his wife, Sue, and the Episcopalian bishop over. For this meal she decided to take on
saumon en papillote
—salmon baked in parchment paper—that was just incredible. It was the sort of thing you'd pay a small fortune for in a restaurant, but here Molly was, making it at home.”

In addition to being a friend, Schultzie was also a frequent cooking buddy and avowed newshound who did not fear a good fight. In the 1970s Marilyn, a veteran of network television news, sued NBC for wage, sex, and age discrimination. She paid dearly for this courageous move—both personally and professionally—although women who followed benefited. Although the suit was filed in 1971, right up to her death in 2010 she refused to talk about it publicly. Anyone who has had the temerity to face down corporate power—and won—can tell you the experience is not just emotionally draining. Depending on how dirty a former employer wants to play, it can also render you unemployable.

Her courage in leading a class-action suit against the NBC mother ship and its affiliates on behalf of women who wanted equal opportunity and pay
forever changed the way media institutions set pay and promotion scales.

The lawsuit took a terrible toll on Marilyn, although she was in good company. Think Brooksley Born, one of maybe three people in the world who actually understood credit swaps and those incomprehensible, complex financial instruments called derivatives—pesky critters that caused a near-cataclysmic collapse on Wall Street a couple of years ago.

Several years before that financial meltdown, Born warned of the dangers associated with careless trading of derivatives. And what did her warnings get her? She was forced to resign as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an obscure, relatively unknown agency—until she called for regulation and the rooting out of fraud. What was she thinking?!

Or consider FBI special agent Coleen Rowley, who exposed internal FBI problems and publicly criticized the agency for its clumsy handling of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Does anybody even remember Cynthia Cooper, the World-Com vice president who exposed billions of dollars in accounting irregularities? Or Sherron Watkins, a former Enron vice president, who warned of the oil giant's potential collapse to no avail? They all lost their jobs as a result of doing the right thing.

There still isn't a lot of wiggle room for strong women who speak truth to power. Like most of Molly's female friends, all of these women easily qualified for steel magnolia status, including Schultzie, despite her Indiana roots.

When Schultzie died unexpectedly from multiple medical complications at the age of sixty-four, she was an associate professor of communications at Austin's St. Edward's University. She died on January 10, 2010, just a few weeks before the third anniversary of Molly's January 31 death in 2007. Marilyn's memorial service revealed dimensions of her dynamic personality none of us had known, such as the immense affection and respect she had for her students.

Just as few people had known about Molly and her love of cooking, friends who thought they knew Marilyn well were deeply moved by the video montage her students created in tribute to her.