Of all the governors on the rotunda wall, Ann Richards, who served from 1991 to 1995, is the most memorable, at least in my lifetime. She was incredibly vivid, with that stark white hair swept and sprayed into a blinding pompadour—Molly Ivins called it “hard hair”—and a switchblade sense of humor that was honed on the primitive male chauvinism she had grown up with. She became a national figure when she gave the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention. “Poor George,” she said of the Republican nominee, George H. W. Bush, “he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his
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