She was a Republican activist. I was not. What I learned from our unlikely friendship
Barbara Espinosa was a firecracker to the end.
The last time I saw the longtime Republican Party activist, blogger and radio host, she was in a hospital bed, hooked up to a breathing machine.
She had trouble talking, but the 86-year-old native Texan could still crack jokes and tell ribald stories for her visitors, of whom I was one of many.
She had fallen at her home where she lived alone with her beloved Shih Tzu, Lucy. Transported to the hospital, she was diagnosed with pneumonia and got progressively worse.
On Jan. 16, her body gave out on her. She was 86.
Espinosa was a staunch Republican
Barbara was such a force of nature, I thought she’d never die.
The month before, I’d driven with her up to Wickenburg for a celebration of life for another Arizona GOP blogger of renown, Florence “Frosty” Taylor, editor of the widely read “Republican Briefs” newsletter.
Barbara walked with the aid of a rollator, but she was in her element, smiling and swapping tall tales. Republicans dominated the crowd. Barbara would introduce me to her fellow GOPers, saying, “He’s a Democrat,” while rolling her eyes with a look of semi-disgust.
I reminded her that I was now a registered independent. She harrumphed that it was, at least, an improvement.
A successful realtor and a past president of the Scottsdale Realtors association, Barbara reveled in Republican politics, raising money and campaigning for Texas Governor Rick Perry, both Bush presidents and John McCain, though she soured on McCain in later years.
In the late ’90s, she took on deep-pocketed interests by opposing a plan to convert the Scottsdale Galleria into a taxpayer-supported megadevelopment with museums, restaurants and Venetian-like canals.
She chaired “Save Old Scottsdale,” a grassroots campaign against the fat cats, and won, with voters rejecting the project at the polls, 54-46.
But she was willing to cross party lines
She ran for Scottsdale City Council a couple of times and lost, but she remained a Republican precinct committeeman and maintained influence in the party through her blog, “American Freedom by Barbara” and a radio show with former GOP state party chair Randy Pullen, “Hair on Fire.”
Despite being a rock-ribbed Republican, she was willing to cross party lines if she thought it was the right thing to do.
In 2014, she took a dislike to Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Ducey. So, she endorsed and donated money to Ducey’s Democratic foe, Fred DuVal, now chair of the Arizona Board of Regents.
The Maricopa County Republican Committee censured her for the line-crossing. Espinosa was defiant. “Not a snowball’s chance in Hell will I fall in line,” she told Phoenix New Times.
She worshipped Donald Trump. She was virulently anti-abortion, anti-immigration (last name aside), anti-Obamacare, and she could be insensitive when it came to matters of race, as someone from her generation, raised in the South, could be.
To her credit, she enthusiastically befriended and backed Black Republicans running for office, such as former Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker.
Friends are more important than politics
In an age where people talk openly of civil war and our political discourse is so blackened with hate, Barbara and I should never have been friends.
Yet, friends we were. She liked me, and I liked her. I enjoyed hearing her stories of things she’d seen and people she’d known while living in Dallas, and later in Tucson and Phoenix.
She witnessed the assassination of JFK, dated gambler Binny Binion’s son, hobnobbed with LBJ, knew oil magnate H.L. Hunt, met Joe Bonnano and Elvis.
When I visited her last, she regaled me with a story I’d heard many times before but loved hearing again. In the early ‘60s, Barbara frequented Jack Ruby’s nightclub in Dallas, where Ruby, the future assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, inevitably made the rounds.
Imitating Ruby, she made a motion like opening a suit jacket, saying, “I’m Jack Ruby, wanna buy a watch?” His coat was lined with them, she said.
Are there things she’s said that I cannot defend? Yes. She would certainly say the same of me.
Still, what Barbara taught me is that some things are more important than politics, friendship being one.
This is, admittedly, an antiquated worldview. But for our country’s survival, I hope it’s one we embrace anew.
Stephen Lemons is a freelance journalist in metro Phoenix. Reach him at stephenlemons76@yahoo.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Barbara Espinosa was the firecracker friend we all wish we had
