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Roddy Stinson, a beloved colleague and beloved grandfather but also a feared subway columnist for the Express-News from 1974 to 2008, died on Wednesday of urethral cancer. He was 81 years old.
His friends and even some of his targets over the years have remembered him as an at times awkward rebuke and a scholar and hardworking columnist who defended the speechless mechanic or janitor of the working class while throwing at several times the politicians of the town hall.
“Roddy had a gene that just wouldn’t let him side with the powerful and the rich, especially when their victims were powerless,” said former mayor Henry Cisneros, who at times drew Stinson’s ire.
But Stinson was just as hard on “the hypocritical defenders of the poor who were demagogic, hyperbolic and let power go to their heads,” Cisneros continued. “He was an equal opportunity scolder.”
Roddy Frank Stinson was born in Mt. Vernon, Texas on September 17, 1940 to a stay-at-home mom and science teacher father who moved the family to Marshall in 1942.
Raised in what he once described as a strictly Southern Baptist home, Stinson attended East Texas Baptist College in Marshall, where he met his future wife, Myrna Floy Willis, and then attended the University of Texas. in Austin.
In Marshall, Stinson and his wife were both college cheerleaders. He told a Texas public radio audience in 2016 that he married a woman who was actually called “Miss Christian Citizen of the Entire Campus” and said he had “not tasted beer. , wine or alcohol of any kind “until the age of 34 years.
“Dope, to me, was a Methodist,” he joked to the crowd. “And the heroine would have been Dale Evans (wife of television cowboy legend Roy Rogers).” But he went on to explain that, years later, as a die-hard columnist, he occasionally interviewed drug dealers and prostitutes for gripping stories on San Antonio’s belly.
Well into his 70s, colleagues confirmed, his drink of choice when meeting at a bar would be a coke.
While living in Memphis, where he worked for the Southern Baptist Brotherhood Commission, Stinson and his wife became members of the Prescott Memorial Baptist Church and, according to the Stinson family, helped make Prescott the first Southern Baptist church. racially integrated in the middle of the year. South.
The effort caused about a third of church members to flee, Stinson later told the TPR crowd.
“Roddy was a serious Christian. He was not a Kool-Aid drinker, ”said a former colleague who asked not to be cited by name.
Before the relentless seduction of social media, in an era when big-city American newspapers dominated public discourse in their cities, Stinson did the impossible: he wrote a column six days a week, some seven years.
There are said to be over 9,000 in all, in the honored tradition of journalists on the crusade, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the well-to-do.
“He was a tough columnist, but a gentle man,” recalled former Express-News editorial page editor Bruce Davidson, now senior assistant to Mayor Ron Nirenberg. “He was a teacher in the newsroom and has trained many journalists over the years. He was a very skillful and economical blacksmith. It would get to the heart of a story in a beautiful way.
Stinson didn’t have the time and resources to conduct the months-long, data-driven surveys readers are now accustomed to. But his fans will remember, decades later, that he proved that “the Air Force poisoned the ground of Kelly Field with chemicals which contaminated the water of the basement”, as already has it. noted former Express-News editor Charles Kilpatrick.
“The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for research less important than Roddy’s individual campaign” to document this pollution and its effects on neighboring neighborhoods, Kilpatrick added.
A bantamweight of stature, Stinson could deftly deflate the pompous. He used to tease the nobility of Alamo Heights by giving their dogs the kind of names they probably got in real life. In 1994, he lambasted the English-only movement which was then popular in some circles, writing that this was “positive proof that many people who call themselves ‘conservatives’ are just garden bullies hiding behind the label”.
In the same column, Stinson suggested that an English-speaking supervisor of a reader might benefit from simply having his Spanish-speaking employees teach him some vocabulary.
“And I guarantee you will get smarter,” he preached, “and with a little practice, less of a dyspeptic jerk.”
On downturn days, Stinson relied on the veteran columnist’s best friend – a mailbag of indignant letters sent by adoring readers. Aggrieved bus passengers, public service customers, teachers victims of permissive parents – he gave them all a voice.
Sometimes a few words from one of “Roddy’s Rangers” appearing in his must-read column were enough to curb abuse and hold perceived wrongdoers to account.
“Roddy’s Column was the inner voice that tugged at our conscience and our heart,” said former mayor Ed Garza. “His practical and tenacious writing style on civic issues was still relevant to my grandparents, working class family and neighbors.”
Even his most admiring friends say his cranky crusades against unnecessary public spending that did not suit his taste have reached extremes. After one of his tirades about spending taxpayer money on the arts, a local bumper sticker replied, “Get Roddy Laid. “
He liked it, of course.
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