She refers to this six-year period as "the happy golden period of sunshine, laughter and beer and living considerably below the poverty line." The job afforded her her first encounters with the wacky Texas Legislature, whose high jinks she advertised to the rest of the country in numerous freelance articles. And then, she says, "I quite accidentally acquired something of a national reputation." Ivins became the go-to gal for scribes who needed to be enlightened on matters in the Lone Star State.

Then in 1976 the New York Times hired her away from the Observer, commencing a six-year period that is rife with Ivins legend. The wisecracking reporter and the Great Gray Lady did not saunter together hand in glove. First she covered New York politics, then was named Rocky Mountain bureau chief -- which was great, Ivins says, because "as long as you're a thousand miles away from them, working for the Times is wonderful."

Problem was, the Times doesn't do folksy. In one story, Ivins described someone as "having a beer gut that belongs in the Smithsonian." That ended up in the paper as "a man with a protuberant abdomen." Ivins also recalls tromping around the Times office in her stocking feet, which did not endear her to Abe Rosenthal, the paper's executive editor at the time.

Times reporter Adam Clymer, whom Ivins had befriended, recalls her tenure. "The Times in those days was concerned that their writing was dull," he says. "They had a theory that they could hire some great writer from some place or other, and then just polish them, just sand them down a little, and they'd be fine at the Times. Molly was one of the most spectacular failures of that theory. I mean, Molly doesn't sand down.

"She once had a marvelous proposal," Clymer continues. "The metropolitan desk in those days was not a very happy place. And she once suggested that what they ought to do was publish the official shit list each week -- because probably more people thought they were on it than actually were, and this would be reassuring."

What finally did Ivins in at the Times was her story about a community chicken-killing festival, which she described as a "gang pluck." "I was sort of abruptly recalled like a defective automobile and replaced," she says. "I had transgressed once too often."

There are no bad feelings, though. "I must say, it was an instructive experience ... to see daily journalism practiced at that level of excellence," she says. "But they called from Dallas and said, 'Come on down, we're having a newspaper war.' And that sounded to me like a hell of a lot more fun than the New York Times, so off I loped to Dallas." In 1982 she became a columnist at the Dallas Times Herald, with license to write whatever she wanted. "I spent three years in Dallas and laughed hysterically the entire time," she says.

But, sadly, the Times Herald lost the newspaper war; the competing Dallas Morning News bought the Herald in '92 and shut it down. Ivins wrote of the experience in Mother Jones magazine: "My newspaper died the other day. I'd worked for the Dallas Times Herald for ten years, and its death was a kick in the gut the like of which I cannot recall ever having experienced."

At the same time her newspaper folded, her first book, "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?" was flying off the shelves. "It was a ridiculous point in my life where I was broke, unemployed and on the New York Times bestseller list. It was a really confusing period," she says.

Ivins bounced back quickly, though, when another Texas newspaper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, offered her a column on the same terms. She toils there to this day and is syndicated in close to 300 newspapers. She is single and lives in her own home in Austin, proudly earning "less than $100,000 a year -- if that's of any interest to anyone -- which is a lot less than the football writer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram makes," she says. She supplements her paltry income by lecturing and participating in special events such as the recent Nation cruise, in which the political weekly set sail in the western Caribbean with Studs Terkel, Jim Hightower, Barbara Kingsolver, Calvin Trillin and others, in addition to Ivins.

She has written articles for several major magazines, including Esquire and Harper's, but has a special fondness for contributing to scrappy left-wing rags like the Progressive and the Nation, not to mention the Texas Observer, for which she raises funds and writes.

"I think it's going to become more and more important to keep those little independent voices alive," she says. "I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff -- the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry."

Typically, when Ivins gets on a solemn jag like this, she checks it with a wisecrack: "I mean, what is the point of being 56 years old if you cannot sit around and bitch about the collapse of standards? That and the trouble with young people today. I love, I love, middle age. Sitting around bitching about the collapse of standards and the trouble with young people today is just fabulous."

And this, really, is the secret of Ivins' genius -- the balance of humor and passion. There are columnists out there who have one or the other, but without the two together, there's half a loaf. Columnist Dave Barry, for example -- he beat Ivins to a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 -- is funny, but you don't get the sense that he cares particularly deeply about anything. On the other hand, a columnist like Ellen Goodman is passionate, but goes down something like medicine.

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