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?

Public decides which news has value

Society Department. From left, Helen DuBois Johnson, Amalia Stevens Burns, Alice Lesesne Beville
and Ann Battle. Note the one telephone for the office and the very clean desk tops.
Of course, there were no personal computers in the 1930s.

Although Mobile, Alabama, had a population of about 70,000 in the 1930s, it was still a small town in many ways. The Society Department at The Mobile Press Register reflected the slower Southern lifestyle of the Port City.

When 18-year-old Ann Battle joined newspaper in 1935, her first job in the Society Department was to write the gossip column “Polly Puts the Kettle On.” The column concerned weddings, club meetings and parties.

She worked for the Society Department only in the afternoons. In the mornings, she covered the Chamber of Commerce and trials in federal court. On Saturday afternoons, Battle had to be at the paper to read proof sheets, check the spelling of names and making sure the Sunday pages went together correctly.

In the Society Department, Battle had to contend with the legendary Chandler sisters, Miss Nettie and Miss Mary.

The sisters, who were no relation to Press Register publisher Ralph Chandler, had worked on the Register for many years covering society news. When the Press and Register merged in 1932, they were not picked up by the new paper and went to work for The Mobile Times, a short-lived daily, for a few years before joining the Press Register.

Miss Nettie, being 10 years older than her sister, dominated the relationship. Miss Mary dismissed herself as “just a period after Miss Nettie’s name.”

On the Register, Miss Nettie had begun the popular “Betty Letters,” letters from the fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicling the goings on of Mobile society. She continued the feature at the Press Register.

But Miss Nettie couldn’t type and wrote the letters in longhand, which the composing room staff refused to take. So Miss Mary learned to type, with two fingers laboriously, while Miss Nettie dictated.

Many male journalists derided such work then, just as some historians do today. But the women of the Society Department produced news that people were willing to pay to read. The public, as always, decided which news had value.

A genteel reporter with a nose for hard news

The first reporter hired by publisher Ralph B. Chandler when he began The Mobile Press in 1929 was Frances Ruffin Durham.

A genteel woman with a nose for news, Durham graduated from St. Joseph’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. She broke in as a police reporter on The New Orleans States during World War I, when male reporters were in short supply.

She had to persuade editors at the States of her worth. One of those editors was Semmes Colston, grandson of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes. Colston disliked women on newspapers and didn’t hesitate to say so.

One of Durham’s first assignments took her to the New Orleans city dump. She wrote a touching story about waifs who had changed a field of refuse into a garden spot. Other newspapers around the country picked up the story and Durham’s city editor conceded that “the new girl belongs.”

When World War I ended, Durham came to Mobile. Political opponents of liberal Frederick I. Thompson, publisher of The Mobile Register, relied on her reporting their views in Victor Hanson’s Birmingham News and Frank P. Glass’ Montgomery Advertiser. She also reported for the weekly Mobile Post until Chandler hired her for The Mobile Press and contributed features to Georgia newspapers. H. L. Menken’s American Mercury, among others, published her fiction.

With the merger of the Press and the Register in 1932, Durham became the first society editor of The Mobile Press Register.

Personal Sidebar

The above photo of Durham was taken by Wilson Burton, a photographer at the Blue Light Studio in Mobile. He later became the photographer for Hammel’s Department Store and remained there for years. The Mobile Press Register published a feature article about him on June 22, 2008. You can also view some of his photos online. His cameras were donated to the University of South Alabama.

Burton was married to one of my cousins, Gladys Pierce.

Teenage woman reporter exposes wrongdoing in the 1930s

In this 1935 photo, Ann Battle poses on a desk in the Society Department of The Mobile Press Register, then located on St. Louis Street. She described the dress as a "Paris model...gray with a pink collar." She said "I thought I was a knock-out," as indeed she was.

I have never met a more delightful or sweeter person than Ann Battle Hawkins. Over many visits in her home and in letters and phone conversations she shared stories with me about the time she spent at The Mobile Press Register in the 1930s.

The former Convent of Mercy building.

In 1931, a then 18-year-old Ann Battle, freshly graduated from the Convent of Mercy school and equipped with typing skills from a six-week course, joined the mostly youthful staff of the newspaper. Alfred Battle Bealle, Ann’s cousin and associate editor of The Birmingham News, recommended her to Society Editor Frances Ruffin Durham, who was looking for someone to write a gossip column at the Press.

Ann told me her work on the Press Register sometimes shocked her mother’s sense of proper behavior for a young woman.

During the Great Depression, a woman who lived on Old Shell Road ran a “placement agency” in which she charged a fee to find work for unemployed women. The newspaper suspected a fraud, but had no way of knowing for sure.

So the paper’s editors asked Ann to pose as a woman looking for a job. The editors had her dress in her most worn clothes, gave her an old purse and some money. They drove her to within two blocks of the woman’s house and walked from there. Ann paid a fee to the agency, but never received a call about a job.

As a result, the newspaper was able to show how unemployed women were being cheated out of their money by the agency.

Although just a small town story (Mobile had a population of about 68,000 in the 1930s), it was in the expose tradition of Nellie Bly at Pulitzer's New York World.

Do you have a story about people at The Mobile Press Register or a photo that you would like to share? If so, please contact me. I would be pleased to share them on Newspapering.