Abby Rapoport has the rare distinction of having served as a Texas Observer staff writer, publisher, and board chair. Perhaps equally rare, she can claim a first appearance in the Observer’s pages at the tender age of “2 years and 9 months.”
In September 1987, Bernard Rapoport—Abby’s grandfather and a man once described by Molly Ivins as “the only Jewish, socialist insurance millionaire in Waco”—penned a short essay about taking his granddaughters to an “animal safari” in which he lamented the high cost of admission and the pernicious effects of poverty in America. The piece was ostensibly an advertisement for Bernard’s insurance company, though he often used the space to share essays by himself or others. He was long “the Observer’s principal advertiser and financial mainstay,” as founding editor Ronnie Dugger wrote in 1996, and by all accounts the publication would have died long ago without his support and that of his wife, Audre. After the Observer became a nonprofit in the ’90s, Bernard served on the board until his death in 2012, and the family has continued its financial support.
Abby—today the publisher of Stranger’s Guide, an award-winning travel magazine—was raised in Virginia, but she chose to go into the field of Texas muckraking journalism herself. After editing her college newspaper, she did stints at Texas Monthly and the newly founded Texas Tribune before coming to the Observer, where she covered education and politics from 2010 to 2012. Her father, Ronald, also served on the Observer’s board (for a brief time, three Rapoports appeared on the masthead). In 2016, Abby returned as a board member and soon, in a moment of organizational and financial peril for the publication, stepped in to steer the ship as acting publisher. The Observer spoke with her about family history, rural reporting in the blog era, and hope.
