In June of 2000, the Texas Observer’s longest tenured editor, Lou Dubose, bade farewell with a note poetically titled “The Phones Were Ringing.” He recounted a time, three years prior, when a draft of a story—involving the Ku Klux Klan and a curious GOP voter registration strategy in a Texas border county—had gotten loose and was circulating like journalistic contraband. Calls were streaming into the Observer office as people sought out a copy of the still-unpublished issue. Then, with little ado about himself, Lou said goodbye: “It has been a wonderful thirteen years. It’s time to go.”
Since the late ’80s, Dubose had not only edited the Observer but written for the publication at a prodigious rate, with a special emphasis on Mexico and Latin America. He’d been “the heart of this office and the Observer,” wrote Michael King, his co-editor in the late ’90s. The following month, a reader from El Paso wrote in describing his reaction when he realized that the editorial about phones ringing was actually Dubose’s farewell: “‘Shit,’ I said out loud to my wife Lee, ‘Lou Dubose is leaving the Observer!’ But Lee was already asleep. Oh, well. I had my own little epiphany of sorrow.”
Between 2000 and 2007, Dubose went on to co-author some six books chronicling the George W. Bush administration, three co-written with Molly Ivins. He then spent about a decade editing The Washington Spectator, a D.C.-based progressive politics publication. Now 76, he splits most of his time between Hawaii and Spain and is working on a novel. In October, he was back in Austin for a bit, and the Observer caught up with him at the KOOP radio studio to chat about his career, the state of media, and the hazards of meeting book deadlines with Ivins.
