Passings: Ronnie Dugger

 NY Times -  Ronnie Dugger, the crusading editor of a small but influential Texas journal who challenged presidents, corporations and America’s privileged classes to face their responsibility for racism, poverty and the perils of nuclear war, died on Tuesday at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas. He was 95...

Inspired by Thomas Paine’s treatises on independence and human rights, Mr. Dugger was the founding editor, the publisher and an owner of The Texas Observer, a widely respected publication, based in Austin, that with few resources and a tiny staff took on powerful interests, exposed injustices with investigative reports and offered an urbane mix of political dissent, narrative storytelling and cultural criticism.

Sam Smith - In the spring of my sophomore year I read in Broadcasting magazine that WWDC, an independent station in Washington, DC, was developing a major news operation. Most stations at the time just ripped and read copy from the wires; the exceptions were usually network affiliates.

I immediately added WWDC to a list of 40 stations -- all the others in New England -- to which I sent summer job applications. All the New England stations rejected or ignored me, but WWDC took me on. And so I returned to my native Washington, which my family had left when I was ten...

My bosses were two Texas liberals -- news director Joe Phipps and his assistant Bob Robinson. Short and bald, Phipps appeared a bespectacled and ambulatory small mouth bass. When excited his eyeballs almost rubbed against his glasses. His voice ebbed and flowed between 1950s broadcast fog and full-blown southern oratorical eruption. Robinson, on the other hand, had an unflappable Texas drawl. A tall man with white hair, Robinson was as imperturbable as Phipps was instantly reactive.

I already knew that Texas liberals were special people; Tom Whitbread, a poet and Harvard tutor, had introduced me to the Texas Observer, newly started by Ronnie Dugger. The Observer was a remarkable voice of sense and liberty in an era turning dogmatically dumb and mean. In the first issue, Dugger quoted Thoreau: "The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth."

Beyond their politics, I liked that Texas liberals seemed to enjoy themselves and that even the worst election brought a new batch of stories. Such as the one about the freshman state legislator being advised that the best way to stay honest was to sell out to one interest group fast; that way the rest would leave you alone. Or about the Texas trial lawyer who stole from the rich . . . and gave approximately half to the poor. I liked the tales of Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough -- the yin and yang of the Texas senatorial delegation. Even the names that cropped up -- like Creekmore Fath or Cactus Prior -- were fun.