Today, it's almost hard to remember just how different the Texas government was back in the 1970s. That's when Molly Ivins scorched a trail through good-ol'-boy politics like a flamethrower through a cactus patch.
"The legislature was fairly corrupt in those days," she said to NPR in 2006. "And the fact that it was, and that everybody knew it, and that people laughed about it, struck me as worth reporting. And I thought: Why not put it in the way it is?"