Ann Richards remembered.

Dorothy Ann Willis was born the only child of Cecil and Mildred Iona Willis, in a small town near Waco, at the depth of the Depression. Her daddy was a salesman and her mother sewed all Ann's clothes. Her father always told her she could do anything she wanted.

"I was in college before I found out he was wrong," she said.

She and Dave Richards had dated in high school. She went to Baylor on a debate scholarship, and they were married as undergraduates.

Ann got a teaching certificate and taught junior high, which I regard as a thankless assignment. But she had a real empathy for kids at that impossible age.

As governor, she took around a class of gifted and talented kids, mostly black and brown, who were visiting the capitol for the day.

"Who owns this building?" asked Ann.

"The taxpayers," the kids finally concluded after much nudging.

"Who are the taxpayers?"

"My parents pay taxes!" shouted one kid.

"What about you? If you go to buy a candy bar, do you pay taxes on it?"

A candy bar receipt was finally produced, and sure enough it had tax added on it. "WE own the capitol," they all shouted.

An Richards's public life was mostly about gender. She was outrageous and courageous on behalf of women everywhere. When Ann first ran for state treasurer in 1982 you could feel it: the start of a movement. Those women with big hair and big purses in Amarillo and Abilene flocked to hear her. Running the treasurer's office was just like balancing a checkbook "except more zeroes," she said, adding: "Women are trained to detail, and we are expected to juggle a lot of balls at once." She attended to the details, actually listened to the civil servants, and made the place run better.

The 1990 campaign for governor was a real nail-biter against Claytie Williams. Ann was running for "a new Texas," and Claytie, with his good ol' boy racism and sexism, kept defining "old Texas" in the most helpful way. Ann won on the women's vote, and her Inauguration Day was genuinely special. A crowd of Texans--white, black, and brown--marched from the bridge to the capitol.

Ann inherited a huge mess as governor, and she fixed just about all of it. Along the way, she disappointed many liberals, but then, she was elected governor of Texas, not Sweden. While she built 60,000 new prison cells, she did put 14,000 beds into a prison alcohol rehab program. More than once she slipped into a circle of convicts and said, "My name is Ann and I am an alcoholic."

Ann ran again after four exhausting years, and it was fairly apparent she didn't really want to do it. She had been working flat out for the entire term. Although few people knew it, Ann had a form of grand real epilepsy that could result in seizures; it was dangerous for her to get worn out. What she really needed was someone to take her tired ass home. But she felt under such pressure to run again--all those people who believed in her, all those women who were inspired by her.

Had Ann been able to see just a little further into the future, she would have run like a racehorse. She really felt contempt for Bush and thought his ignorance and his arrogance a dangerous combination.

The '94 election was a God, gays, and guns deal. Annie had told the legislature that if they passed a right-to-carry law, she would veto it. They did, and she did. At the last minute, the NRA launched a big campaign about how Texas women would feel ever so much safer if we could just carry guns in our purses.

Said Annie, "Well, you know that I am not a sexist, but there is not a woman in this state who could find a gun in her handbag."

Molly Ivins writes in this space every month. Her latest book is "Who Let the Dogs In?"