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.
TO: You first appeared in one of our issues before you were forming memories. Do you have a first memory of the Observer?
Well, I remember Molly [Ivins] from a pretty young age, because I would spend a few weeks a year with my grandparents in Waco. And they wouldn’t adjust their lives for it. They were a weird blend of completely besotted with me but also we just went with their schedules. So most nights there was a political dinner or a meeting. So I remember we would go to Austin a lot, when my grandfather was chairman of the board of regents of [the University of Texas], and we would see Molly and [former Observer editor] Lou Dubose. Those memories are really strong.
Did Molly’s personality come across to a kid your age?
Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I mean, she was larger than life. She was this crazy storyteller, she swore a lot, which my grandparents didn’t swear. And it was a funny thing because we’d see political figures a lot. We’d see labor figures. We’d see business figures. But Molly was from this sort of messy, wild journalism world which my grandparents didn’t really fit.
Your grandfather lived to see Texas pass into total Republican control. Do you get the sense he kept hope about Texas politics?
He was like the world’s most optimistic person. He always saw possibility, and I think a lot of that had to do with his own experiences, and, even though Democrats were in power, the causes he most cared about were always uphill battles. And, you know, there were always these tremendous points of pride for him like the University of Texas. That it was public and great, and the feeling he had that there was a path forward for a kid like him, immigrant parents and poor and didn’t come from an English-speaking home. His parents spoke Yiddish and Spanish [he was raised in San Antonio] and Russian. He was a tremendous believer in education being accessible to anyone, and that it was a place where you could have radical beliefs and different kinds of thinkers. And I think watching this sort of assault on higher ed [by Republicans today] would have been particularly painful for him.
How did you decide to go into practicing journalism yourself?
I always liked journalism, in part because I was raised in a pretty Southern home where there was an emphasis on politeness, and I felt like journalism was where you got to ask nosy questions, and I liked that.
Then I ended up, in college in Iowa, co-editor-in-chief [of the Scarlet & Black Grinnell College student paper] in 2008. And it was like the first internet journalism election where suddenly news was breaking on the internet before it was getting in the paper. And we had this little college newspaper website and we could actually write stuff that people read. And I just loved it. I loved the rush.
A couple years later, you found your way to the Observer as a writer. What was your time here like?
It was crazy. But it was fun. It was an exciting time because it was the first big transition of the Observer away from being sort of a newsprint, newspaper magazine. It was moving to monthly. And online we each had our own blog with our name on it. So the Observer was sort of experimenting with multimedia, new formats, and new ways of telling stories.
Also there was too much work and not enough people, so the expectations were crazy. But I was with people who were amazing, Forrest [Wilder], Dave [Mann], and Melissa [del Bosque] were all such pros. It was quite intimidating, but I was allowed to, like, just leave [on reporting trips], and what I discovered was that if you showed up in rural Texas, even if you were coming from a liberal magazine, just showing up there meant a lot to people. And then the [legislative] session was amazing. But it was also ridiculous.
So you went through that whirlwind, then to The American Prospect as a writer, then you came back to join the board and later be acting publisher. What motivated you to help the Observer in these other ways?
I’d become increasingly interested in the business side of journalism. And then, [my daughter] Bina had just turned one when I joined the board, and my grandmother [Audre] had just died, so I think there was something really meaningful about going back to this place that held this promise and hope that certainly my grandparents had and, I’m being all mushy, but it was a weird time. The rise of Trump. I found out I was pregnant with [my younger daughter] Tova like two days before the 2016 election.
It felt natural to join the board. It felt a little more scary to come in as acting publisher, but, I mean, I tried to hire people and we were not successful. It was a pretty scary time at the Observer, so I didn’t have a good vision for what would happen if I said no. And it felt so important.
The Observer made it through that time, and a couple years later you started Stranger’s Guide. It’s a fairly different kind of publication. What led you to it?
I’ve always tried to do things I’m interested in and learn new things. But also, I really think place is such a critical piece of storytelling. Place provides the contours and the constraints of every story. When the Observer‘s at its best, Texas is almost this character in it. It’s like, what is this weird, messy state we all love in spite of ourselves, right? And we want it to be better because we see its possibility. And I felt that perspective was sort of missing, particularly internationally. It’s so important for there to be space for people to tell their own stories and define these complicated places. So in some ways, it’s really different, and in some ways it’s very related.
Things look pretty bleak right now for this weird, messy state. We’re still here at the Observer plugging away at this idea that investigative journalism, and stories that kind of bind together the progressive community in Texas, will play some part in some change at some point. Basically, do you still see a path forward?
Going back to the earlier part of the conversation, I was raised in this family whose story is pretty improbable. This Russian-Jewish communist who winds up in San Antonio, it’s a very weird thing. I think you just gotta keep moving forward and see possibility—and stories are critical to imagination, and to have a different future you have to imagine it.
The thing that’s always been special about Texas, I think, is that there has been this strong sense of community, even though people are from very different places with different perspectives. It means something to be Texan, regardless of what part of the state you’re from. And I think the great hope of a place like the Observer is, can we question our myths, can we rewrite and challenge ourselves, but also maintain that sense of possibility and of us being bound together? And, you know, this is where I’ve kind of put my chips. So I’m hoping that’s true.
This interview, which is part of the Observer’s 70th anniversary coverage, has been edited for length and clarity. Support for our 70th anniversary interview series has been provided by KOOP Radio in Austin, which permitted its studios to be used for recordings.
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