Trailblazing writer created Chronicle’s TV beat in early ’60s
Ann Hodges, the longtime journalist who established the Houston Chronicle’s TV beat in the early 1960s, died Feb. 8 in Austin. She was 94.
Hodges first started working at the Chronicle in 1948, working from the city desk and sitting in a smoke-filled room of mostly men. She left to work for a year at an English-language newspaper in Mexico City, then took about a decade off to have children. She was lured back in 1962 to be the newspaper’s first television writer, columnist and critic. She retired from the Chronicle in 2003.
During her 50-year career, Hodges was a founding member, executive board member and two-time president of the national Television Critics Association, which meets twice a year to review new slates of TV programming and interview the shows’ writers, directors and actors.
In 1950, just 9 percent of American homes at TVs, but by 1960, some 80 percent did, making Hodges’ job of evaluating TV shows one of social and cultural importance.
She began her career at a time when family fare such as “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “My Three Sons” and “The Andy Griffith Show” and westerns such as “Bonanza,” “Rawhide” and “Wagon Train” were popular. By the end of her career she was gauging the instant gratification of music videos on MTV and the “ripped-from-the-headlines” drama of “Law & Order,” neither of which she cared for, despite their popularity.
Her daughter, Lele Winkley, of Austin, remembers growing up watching TV shows as they aired with her mother, understanding that she needed to be quiet since her mother was working, taking notes and thinking about what she’d write since it was back in the days before shows could be recorded.
“We would watch TV at night with Mom and to keep me quiet she would draw stick figures, and I would draw them back. Every night, I would fall asleep to the sound of the typewriter and I remember thinking ‘My mom types so fast,’” Winkley said. “If I stayed up late, I could hear her calling in the story to the newspaper ... word by word, comma by comma and period by period.”
Hodges was born in 1928, in McCamey to Ernest Cornelius and Margaret Isabel (Wood) Haynes and came to Houston with her family about a year later. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas in 1948. In 1954, she married Cecil Ray Hodges, with whom she had two children, Craig Hodges and Lele. At the time of her death, Hodges had five grandchildren, Ross Brown, Hayley Brown, Faith Winkley, Blake Winkley and Megan Winkley Converse, and two greatgrandchildren, Everett and Charlie Converse.
Mike McDaniel, who started writing about TV at the Chronicle in 1988 alongside Hodges, remembers her as a great friend and mentor who was funny, loving and full of surprises.
“Ann took me under her wing, especially when I was a newbie attending my first gathering of the Television Critics Association, back in the ’90s. It was there that I got a better picture of how much the other critics — from all over the nation — loved and respected her for keeping TV executives and producers and actors honest, by which I mean respectful of their jobs and their responsibilities to a medium that was being delivered into homes across America,” McDaniel said. “
But Hodges could be friends, he said, “with everyday Joes like me and high-faluting people like Bob Hope, Larry Hagman and Aaron Spelling — or Ron Stone, Dave Ward and Marvin Zindler.”
Hodges carried herself with authority, and while she wrote about other people’s performances, she could deliver one herself when needed. When the critics association honored Fred Rogers, she delivered her own tribute, ending it by singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” McDaniel recalled.
Features editor Melissa Aguilar was just out of college when she started editing Hodges. “She taught me a lot about the news business. She could be really tough, but also very generous,” she said. “And Ann could get anyone on the phone.”
Retired feature writer Claudia Feldman, who was a young reporter when Hodges was already an established journalist, remembers Hodges’ commanding presence whenever she was in the newsroom.
“I remember her as a tall and glamorous and funny woman who always seemed so in love with her beat and TV news,” Feldman said. “I loved knowing her and watching her work. She was an inspiration for us because she was a professional journalist when it wasn’t that common (for women). She was so hardworking and did her job so well that it was hard for anyone to say women couldn’t do the job because there she was doing it.”
A memorial service for Hodges will be held at 2 p.m. Monday at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, 717 Sage Road. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made in Ann’s honor to Susan’s Rally and to St. Martin’s Episcopal Church.