Mike Nassour

“I want to credit Jim Hightower’s cantankerousness, and just by God bullheadedness with raising awareness in this state that people are hurt by pesticides. They are. Just because you can buy something at Lowe’s or Home Depot doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to spray it on your face. I think people get that now because of the work he did 40 years ago. Even though there was a lot of pushback, the idea is now out there in the public domain, and that was desperately needed…

(Othal) Brand was up here in Austin, and he was at a meeting at the Pesticide Protection Authority that had been created by the Lege to basically remove pesticide authority from the Texas Department of Agriculture. I cannot forget what Othal said at that first meeting. He said, and this is on tape, you can see this, hopefully it’s still over at State Archives. He said, ‘Well, yeah, they’re being exposed to pesticides, referring to the farm workers, and they’d be dying, but they’d be dying of something else anyway.’ I think that was the last time he attended one of those meetings…

Okra is grown along the banks of the Rio Grande. The plants are about six feet tall, have spiny thorns on them, and you only harvest them during the heat of the summer. You have to put on the hat, the gloves, the overcoat. And then when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity, walk through it and grab individual pieces of okra off these tall stalks. That’s the kind of person Jim Hightower gave a crap about, because he knew when he went to churches and got the fried okra, somebody had pulled it off a stalk and precious few people knew that.“

Mike Nassour was a reporter at  KRGV-TV, the ABC station in the Rio Grande Valley. When he got the job offer from Hightower, Mike said “Yes” right then and there. He says he did not care what the money was. He didn’t care because Hightower would be a hoot to work for, one way or another.