Celestine Sibley began famed career in Mobile

From left, Ralph Poore, Mobile Press editorial page editor; the Rev. William Rewak, Spring Hill College president; Georgie Anne Geyer, nationally syndicated columnist; and Celestine Sibley, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist. The college presented honorary doctorates to Geyer and Sibley.

Celestine Sibley is best known as a journalist and syndicated columnist for the Atlanta Constitution from 1941 to 1999. But in 1929, she was an ambitious 15-year-old student reporter at the Murphy High School Hi Times in Mobile.

That year, The Mobile Press hired her as a weekend cub reporter. At the end of the school year the paper took Sibley on as a summertime replacement. When she graduated in 1933, the Press hired Sibley fulltime for $5 a week.

Celestine Sibley

Sibley worked with another general assignment reporter, the brilliant Hilary Herbert Lyons Jr., who was one of the first recipients of the prestigious Nieman Fellowships. He later joined the staff of The New York Times.

Lyons was just five years older than Sibley but must have seemed to her to be far more sophisticated and worldly. As they walked to assignments together, Sibley questioned him about good literature and faraway places. Once a week they stopped at the Albright and Wood Drug Store to buy The New Yorker magazine and to talk about life in the big city.

She found the excitement infectious in covering election night 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first term as president. Built onto the side of the former sanctuary of the church building the newspaper occupied was an auto parts store. The newspaper stationed Sibley in the store where she sat alone taking returns over the store’s telephone.

In the newsroom next door, Associated Press teletypes clacked out returns from around the country. Clerks

grabbed the typed copy and raced it to the desks of waiting editors. On a building across the street, the newspaper had hung a white sheet. Dark-lettered slides projected the returns received in the newsroom onto the sheet.

Eventually, someone brought Sibley word that she could leave her post and join the victory celebration on the roof. As she got there, a torchlight parade began marching down the street to the music of several bands playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The men on the newspaper staff liked Sibley and treated her as a little sister. The men rearranged their schedules so Sibley could go to Spring Hill College, then a Jesuit school for boys that took female day students during the Great Depression.

Frances Ruffin Durham also became a mentor for Sibley. Reared in rural Mobile County, Sibley’s naiveté about unfamiliar words often sent men in the newsroom into hysterical laughter and they would tell her to “Go ask Mrs. Durham,” who learned the dirty words from her years on the police beat in New Orleans.

Over her 70-year career, Sibley wrote thousands of columns and reported on everything from politics to murder trials. She also authored 25 books.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, she continued working until the final weeks before her death, with her last regular Constitution column appearing on July 25, 1999. Sibley died of cancer at the age of 85 on August 15, 1999. She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007 and into Georgia Women of Achievement in 2010.

Do you know of other well-known journalists who began their careers in Mobile?