LADYBUG FLIES AWAY WITH FOND MEMORIES

Mary Blue is a teacher who years ago traded chalk for typewriter ribbon. The Southeast Missourian distribution area became her classroom.

"I always tried to pass something on that would be a learning experience," said Blue, sipping from a cup of tea while seated at her trim, black dining table.

The woman who has dispensed thousands of gardening tips through her gardening column called "Ladybug" surprised Southeast Missourian readers last Wednesday. She announced that after 35 years the Ladybug has decided to "fly away."

However, there is no room for melancholy in the household of Mary Blue and her husband, Southeast Missourian retired editor John Blue.

On a recent morning, one of the few Tuesdays in more than four decades Mary Blue did not have to think about column content or deadlines, she was looking forward to life minus those demands. "Freedom," Mary Blue said, flashing a bright smile, "I can't tell you how good it is."

But Blue interjected that same brand of vitality into every job she tackled at the Missourian, and there have been many. Like her counterparts in school classrooms, with whom she had trained and worked, Blue found ways to make the subject fresh. She did it year after year at the Southeast Missourian, always as a part-time employee, and, since 1965, from her office in her Cape Girardeau home.

In that home office, her electric typewriter rests on a desk flanked by a file cabinet and a bookcase, both topped with greenery. Using that typewriter and its predecessors, both in her home and at Missourian offices, Blue cranked out 1,978 Ladybug columns, never missing a week.

Yet, her career has included much more.

Last week wasn't the first time Blue has said goodbye to a long-running column. In 1980, she retired after 20 years as the Missourian's food editor.

During that portion of her career, she wrote 1,096 food features. For many of those years, her duties also included compiling an extensive grocery section and the TV Guide, often called the pink sheet, all this in addition to writing her gardening column.

Always careful in her delivery and meticulous in her research, Blue discovered that a particular character trait also helped ease the workload. "I always said you had to have a lot of humor to work on a newspaper," Blue explained, chuckling.

She has seen plenty to grin about -- or otherwise -- since she began her affiliation at the Missourian as a proofreader in 1941. Take the time that a banana cake recipe -- part of a food page feature -- was printed without sugar. Two days' worth of attempts to correct the mistake resulted in printed errors each time.

The first food feature -- an interview with a local cook, a listing of some of her favorite recipes and a photo of the cook in the home -- appeared in the Missourian in 1955. By the late 1950s, responsibility for the food features was split among the female reporters at the Missourian, Peggy Lowes, JoAnn Bock, Barbara Burlison and Blue.

Then, in 1960, "because I liked to cook, and had a college minor in home economics, it fell my way," Blue said of the responsibility for the weekly column. "My first feature was on Susan Seabaugh, the eighth-grade daughter of Dr. and Mrs. L.R. Seabaugh, who made tuna burgers for her sisters and brothers," Blue recalled.

She usually traveled to those interviews with staff photographer Garland Fronabarger, who she said, "knew every road in the district." That was fortunate, because editor Juel Moseley insisted the newspaper extend its coverage beyond Cape Girardeau.

The banner year in her career came unexpectedly in 1965. "That was my year," Blue recalled, with a nod of her head. "I was in the right place at the right time." Not only did her Ladybug column win first award for personal column at Journalism Week at Columbia, but also she was selected for a seven-day trip to Rome as a representative of the press through a Singer Sewing Machine Contest.

Plus, she moved her work home in 1965. A few years ago, the Blues sold their Maria Louise Lane home of 46 years and moved to a home in Chateau Girardeau. "When we decided to move, we had a garden sale and a cookbook giveaway," Mary Blue said. She gave away more than 300 cookbooks and sold seven boxes of garden books.

Much has changed in and out of the newsrooms since her early days there. For instance, Blue said, "At that time, we could not list wine or liquor, we couldn't write cooking sherry. If that was in the recipe, we wrote the recipe and left it out."

There have been physical changes in the work place, too. "When I first worked there, the newsroom was upstairs. We had big fans that blew dirt from the street onto our desks," she said.

Blue, who was reared in Anna, Ill., graduated from college in Cape Girardeau. She was teaching first grade at Kewannee, south of Sikeston, when she married a young Southeast Missourian reporter, John Blue. In those post-Depression days, married women were not allowed to teach, she said, but she was allowed to complete the schoolyear. Shortly after school ended, she became a proofreader at the Missourian.

John Blue, named editor of the Missourian in 1961, retired in 1980. The Blues have a daughter, Anna Elizabeth, whom they call Bunny because she was born on Easter.

While she is modest about her efforts, Mary Blue admitted that "writing has been easy for me," quickly adding that she always keeps Webster's Dictionary close at hand. Her best writing critic is her husband who always edited her copy, marking it just as he would that of any reporter.

His help was invaluable, she said, noting that "sometimes my subjects and verbs were not even cousins."

The move from the classroom to sharing the stories of people and information about food and gardening with newspaper readers was a natural extension for Mary Blue.

"It was John Blue's life," she said. "Instead of blood in his veins, he has printer's ink." The same also could be true of Mrs. Blue.

LADYBUG SAYS...

Part of the fun of working at a newspaper are the questions and comments that come from the public. Here are a few amusing anecdotes Mary Blue shared.

Before the newspaper introduced color photography and everything was printed in black and white, a woman called and asked that a picture be taken of her bed of poppies. Mary began to explain that colors of the flowers would not show up in a newspaper photo. The woman replied, "They are in color all right. They are bright red."

Someone requested an article about a meeting that had occurred the previous week. Mary asked if it wasn't a bit late to publish the story. The person replied that the story couldn't have been printed during the past week saying, "You had no room. All your `col-yums' have been filled up."

A woman asked if her club meeting article could run again. "What's wrong?" Mary inquired. The woman said the information was fine, the problem was it looked bad in her scrapbook where she had to piece together the columns.