2022.04.21 THROW BACK THURSDAY - IT TAKES A LIFETIME
THROW BACK THURSDAY - IT TAKES A LIFETIME
As you will read below, I do feel very reluctant about this, but here goes:
Mary Lou, my special request to you because I know you are reluctant to send it. Please forward this email to the TBT mailing list today. It is a fitting tribute to the “Glue That Binds” LRCHS Class of ’56 together. We all would have made the article two or three times longer citing all you do, however, this is a wonderful salute to a wonderful friend. Sincerely, Bill Harmon
it takes a lifetime
Kimberly Dishongh
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Sunday 17 Apr 2022
Her organizing has aided politics, Central alumni
Mary Lou Cabbiness grew up in Little Rock but moved away for more than 30 years. When she returned, she got involved with the alumni association at her alma mater, Little Rock Central High School. “On September 22, 2022, I will turn 83,” Cabbiness says. “That night I will be sitting on the stage with the Swing Band Reunion while we play a concert to open the 66th Reunion of the LRCHS Class of 1956.”
Mary Lou Cabbiness, pictured at a Little Rock Central High reunion with her late husband, Igor Malczycki, has worked for lawyers in Washington and in Little Rock for most of her adult life. At 82, she has come out of retirement for a third time to work for Little Rock lawyer Ed Daniel. “I love the work,” she says.
Mary Lou Medlock Cabbiness marvels at how fortunate she has been to have people wander into her life.
Cabbiness was born to a single mother in the Florence Crittenden Home in September 1939, and she remained there, a ward of the state, for much of her first year.
“They were saying how sad it was that this 9-month-old baby girl probably would not make it because she had such a bad case of bronchitis,” Cabbiness says. “The doctor who came there had said he had done all he could do.” She was adopted by a woman who had come to the home for a meeting and overheard this story. The woman was 40 and had no children. Her husband, who was 60, insisted they go get the baby so they could help her get well.
“I never left their house,” says Cabbiness, who remembers her mother being a constant presence in every activity she participated in throughout her childhood. “She was the head of every PTA where I was, when I was in Girl Scouts, she was in Girl Scouts, she drove me to school in the morning and picked me up in the afternoon. I was probably the most sheltered person you would ever meet in your life.” Her father, an accountant, moved his office from downtown to their home so there would always be someone home with his daughter.
She went to Cottey College, a private women’s school in Nevada, Mo., after graduating from Little Rock Central High in 1956.
She later married and had three sons; she and her husband divorced and, as a single mother, she got tired of pinching pennies.
“I was teaching school here and working for an attorney and I was really involved in Democratic politics — I still am,” she says. “I said, ‘I can’t make it here.’” In 1970, she loaded up her children and drove to Washington, D.C., with $200 in her pocket and no job lined up when she got there.
Her birth mother had been in and out of her life and happened to live in the Washington area. Cabbiness and her children stayed with her for a while after arriving in town.
Cabbiness knew Wilbur Mills, then a U.S. Representative, from her work with the Democratic Party in Arkansas and she called him for advice about which of two lawyers in Washington would offer her the best opportunity. Mills offered her more money to be his personal secretary.
“When his problems kind of started, they wanted me to go over the House, because I could take shorthand, and take notes on the floor while they were in session,” Cabbiness says.
From there she was offered a job with a big housing law firm.
“I met so many interesting people,” she says.
One of them was Norman Altman, the firm’s senior partner, whose wife, Sophia, started the TV show “It’s Academic,” which has run continuously since 1961.
“It’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest-running TV quiz show and it’s all for high schoolers,” says Cabbiness, who was asked to help with the show in Washington while working at the firm. “What we would do at that time — this is really before computers — was we had little 3 by 5 cards and we would think of questions in science or history or current events. We would print the question and then the answer.” Cabbiness didn’t participate in anything like “It’s Academic” when she was at Little Rock Central High School, but she was a part of the marching band and the concert band there.
She moved back to Little Rock in 2002 and got involved with the alumni association at her alma mater.
As a member of the Central High alumni committee, she helps organize reunions and birthday celebrations. Every Thursday, she delivers email updates to her former classmates, and she has compiled and distributed a directory of graduates, including their spouses’ names, physical and email addresses, phone numbers and birthdays, along with a listing of deceased alumni.
Cabbiness’s husband, Igor Malczycki, died last year. He played football when he was a student at Central, and in recent years they were in the stands for most of the team’s home games.
“Of course we laughed at the difference in the cheerleaders and different things,” she says. “Our cheerleaders wore black turtleneck sweaters and then this thing over it that said LRCHS, and then skirts below the knee, made out of gold corduroy, and saddle loafers.” When a friend who was involved in the swing band at Central asked her for help three or four years ago, she rose to the occasion. Rather than playing music, though, she helps organize and place charts for the musicians during weekly rehearsals as well as during their concerts — and she revels in the time spent among her longtime friends.
“I’m an organizer and I’m always on the go,” she says. “Every Thursday night I hear this wonderful big band music. We’ve got two vocalists. We did Frank Sinatra’s stuff and Tony Bennett’s stuff and ‘A String of Pearls.’ And when they have a concert, I sit up on stage. I mean, what’s not to love?”