Since my retirement after 27 years of working for the Texas Talking Book Program (running its Audio Operations & Volunteer Recording Studio from 2003-2024) I occasionally hear about some of my favorite volunteers… Like Mary Lou Gibson.
– SMiles Lewis
Austin Elders: Meet Mary Lou Gibson, Journalist and Austin’s Voice of Saints
A woman of hundreds of articles and few words
By Maggie Quinlan, Fri., May 9, 2025
“Mary Lou Gibson has one of those bell-clear voices. She was born in 1939, but at times, she sounds like a woman in her 30s. She says she hasn’t noticed.
Her house is bright and tidy in the afternoon. An angel hovers above the couch, painted by her granddaughter. Most of her decorations are black-and-white family photos. They hang in the short front hall – “my wedding wall” – and stand up on an antique desk made of marbled wood. She asks me to pardon the blanket that is neatly draped over a chair. Her 2-year-old corgi mix Wendy is shedding a lot this spring.
Gibson, a trained journalist, has a basket of magazines and newspapers by the hearth. There’s a new issue from a Nebraska high school’s newspaper and copies of two of the Catholic publications which regularly publish her articles on the lives of saints.
It’s been more than 300 articles, over 30 years. In an office with lilac walls, she has two shelves full of books on saints, each shelf two rows deep. Most of the books, she says, have been gifts. She’s become a fixture in Catholic Spirit, the magazine delivered to 80,000 households in the Diocese of Austin. She says she’ll never run out of saints because there are thousands. But she has one restriction: She does not like to write about martyrs. The descriptions of torture stick with her. She pauses. “Anyway! What else?””
Read the rest at the Austin Chronicle online… Austin Elders: Meet Mary Lou Gibson, Journalist and Austin’s Voice of Saints
SMiles Lewis 
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