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Ann Richards touched and changed many lives during her time in public service, and I am fortunate to have known her. I traveled with her and covered her 1990 campaign for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and worked for her in the 1994 loss to George W. Bush.

This story has stuck with me for 15 years, and I often remember it when the going gets a little tough.

Labor Day is a special weekend in Texas. A lot of folks know someone who has a ranch or some property in the country, and there are all types of parties and gatherings where men traditionally go Dove hunting. Wives and girlfriends generally stay back at the house and clean the birds and socialize. There’s lots of beer, barbecue and music; it's a long weekend dedicated to hunting and good friends.

Ann was down about 17 points on Labor Day 1990. Things looked grim. Her opponent was a multigazillionairre cowboy oilman from Midland named Clayton Williams. He was able to write a personal check to fund a $10 million campaign budget, which was unheard of in those days. Everyone knew there was no way in Hell a liberal female Democrat could raise that kind of money.

Ann had to compete in the daily news columns in the mainstream media, what campaign insiders call "earned media."

Williams won the Republican primary that spring without a runoff, based largely on a massive television ad that featured teenagers working in a rock quarry. Williams introduced himself to Texas voters by walking into the quarry and promising to lower crime in Texas. He was going to do that, he pledged, by teaching juvenile delinquents “the joys of busting rocks.”

The race quickly was billed as “Claytie vs. The Lady.”

Richards’ media consultant, the late Bob Squier, had a different take on things. He promised that during September the contest may look like John Wayne v. Lucille Ball, but by November he would use Ann’s iron constitution and mainstream news reports to reframe it as Barbara Stanwyck vs. Gabby Hayes.

That is precisely what happened. But along the way Ann walked through a living hell.

Williams had coasted through his primary, but Richards narrowly prevailed after one of the nastiest three-way contests in state history. One of her opponents, the attorney general of Texas, publicly exposed her in the statewide media as an alcoholic. (She had been sober more than a decade, and it wasn't any real secret in Texas political circles.) He implied in published reports that she may be unstable, and that Texans might want to think twice before they turn over the state to someone who could relapse into a blackout at any moment.

As the general election began that summer, sadly but predictably, a not-so-subtle whisper campaign emerged about her sexual orientation. Soon, the Republican smear machine was pushing the idea of a drug-addicted lesbian on her way to the statehouse.

Ann Richards was a grandmother for God sakes and former school teacher. There is no way to gauge or report the toll this all took on her as her grandchildren and elderly parents heard the things that were being said about her openly in nearly every media market in the state.

But Ann was no quitter.

Then came the anti-gun stuff. Of course, the smear machine contended, what else would this drug-addicted, feminist do, if elected, but take away Bubba’s guns. So, on Labor Day 1990, capital press corps in tow, Ann Richards trekked into East Texas to a lease rented by a state senator to put everyone's mind at ease by killing some birds.

It was a charade, and everyone including Ann knew it. But she never complained. She was in the race to win, and she embraced it every day, one day at a time. Whatever came her way, she did what she had to do.

I wasn’t along on that trip, but it has been recounted hundreds of times. Celia Morris gives a great recap of it in her book, “Storming the Statehouse: Running for Governor with Ann Richards and Dianne Feinstein.”

The hunt was successful, meaning Ann actually fired the gun and didn’t shoot anyone; she wore the appropriate clothes and refrained from doing anything too feminine like giggling. The Dallas-Ft. Worth and Houston television stations showed film of the trip, and the statewide papers wrote it up dutifully.

Later in the day, something much more important happened. Something that told many of us much more about how tough Ann Richards was than whether she could fire a gun. A woman who later became a judge in Dallas County told me about this much later in casual conversation.

The last stop Richards made that day was at a mega flea market near the tiny town of Canton. Ann and the group were drawing a crowd that kept growing as they walked though the cars and tables shaking hands with voters.

As always, young girls flocked to see her. At one point she stopped to talk to them. Ann told the girls – about a dozen of them, all grade school age - that she had been Dove hunting; and that afterward, she had cleaned a few birds. One of the girls asked, “Cleaned the birds?”

Ann said something like, “Yeah, after you kill the birds, you have to pluck out all the feathers. Then, you cut them under their rib cage and stick your hand in there and pull out all the guts, so you can cook them.”

The girls let out a near simultaneous cry of “EWWWWWWWWWWWWW. EWWWWW. EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.”

Then came the Richards magic, as always at the most unexpected moment. Dropping to one knee, looking them in the eye, Ann responded. “EWWWWWWWW???!?! EWWWWWW?????!?”

She paused. Then, the silver-haired, bee-hived grandmother in hunting fatigues told these girls something she wanted them to remember all their lives. Ann wasn’t sure if she was going to win that race, so she wanted every moment to count.

“Well," she said slowly, lovingly, "if you can’t put your hand in the EWWWWWW, you can’t be governor.”

And she stood up, put her arms behind two of the girls and kept walking. Right into the history books.