Mary Stoddard Lowe
Mary Stoddard Lowe has had a life full of travel and adventure. Now back in Texas to be closer to family, Lowe enjoys keeping up her connections with friends all over the country.
After she graduated from Dublin High School in 1969, Lowe went to Cisco Junior College as a commercial art major. When she graduated, she took a job at the Dublin Sewing Factory.
She started out on the assembly line sewing on belt loops, then worked in quality control. Lowe enjoyed the work, but wasn’t sure she wanted to do it for too long. She ended up staying there for five years.
During those years, Lowe and her friend Laura had a great time exploring the area and going dancing. “I sometimes spent five nights a week at cowboy dances,” she said. “That was my favorite thing to do. I was not the drinker, I was the driver and the dancer — I absolutely loved to dance.”
Then in 1974, Lowe saw an ad in the paper for a program to learn secretarial skills through the North Central Texas Council of Governments. She called in and applied, and soon she and Laura left their jobs to start the program.
Before she had even finished school, Lowe was hired by the Council of Governments to work in the Stephenville courthouse employment office, helping other people find work. The position was an interesting perspective on what was going on in town. “Before Norton [now Saint Gobain] started up, I was the girl that went out and took applications and helped put on a big hiring [event],” she said.
She stayed there for a year, then took a job at Lone Star Ag Credit (then called Production Credit), a company specializing in rural and ranch loans. She took payments and helped out with the company’s day-to-day operations. “I worked there for I don’t know how many years, and loved it,” she said. “I think I talked to everybody in the county at that job.”
She balanced her time at the bank with a weekend job working at what was then the Ramada Inn in Stephenville. She’d work the desk on Saturdays and Sundays, checking in visitors. “I got to meet all kinds of people,” she said.
One of those people was Roy Lowe, a Georgia man who worked all over the country on natural gas compressors. He was in town for a job, but he and Lowe hit it off, and ended up spending much of their time together during his trip.
The Lowes married in 1979, and moved soon after to a small town called Bixby near Tulsa, Oklahoma for Lowe’s husband’s job, and Lowe left her credit union and took a job at the Federal Land Bank.
Her husband had a three-year-old son, Jason, from a previous marriage, so after they married, Lowe became a stepmom. She cut back on work to help take care of her stepson, and a couple of years later she and her husband had another son, Joshua. She spent some of her time working as a den leader and assistant scoutmaster for her son’s boy scout troop. “I consider that one of my big accomplishments, going through the boy scouts program with my boys,” she said.
When the children were young, the family would come along on Lowe’s husband’s trips. “He’s gone all over the United States, so we took off summers and would go places with him,” she said. “That was a fun time. The company paid for the motel and the gas, so all we had was a little extra food and goodies that we bought, so those were cheap trips for us.”
They went to Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone, various places in Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, and elsewhere.
After a few years, when the boys were older, Lowe decided to go back to work. After working for so long at Lone Star Ag Credit in Stephenville and the Federal Land Bank in Tulsa, she felt qualified for a job at a bank, and applied at the Bank of Oklahoma.
She ended up working there in the home loan department. Her job was to proofread and double-check loan contracts, which pass through many hands before being finalized. “There’s the buyer and seller’s realtor, the appraiser, the inspector, a lot of people touch that file,” she said. “I had to go behind all these people and make sure they didn’t make any mistakes.”
Her favorite part was the thrill of finding an error in the document. “That was really fun,” she said. “I enjoyed catching the mistakes.”
Lowe stayed at the bank of Oklahoma for 14 years, and then worked at a couple of different mortgage companies doing similar work. She ended up retiring for good in 2014, after breaking her ankle and leg and having to spend several months in rehab to regain mobility.
The Lowes stayed in Oklahoma for a total of 38 years. After Lowe retired, the family decided to move back to Texas in 2014. Their oldest son, Jason, had recently passed away from a heart attack, leaving behind his wife and twin sons, and Lowe wanted to help as much as she could.
They bought some property north of Morgan Mill, and have been living there since. Lowe has enjoyed being closer to her five grandchildren, James, Nora, Susan, Wyatt and Justin.
Throughout her life, Lowe has prioritized traveling and spending time with friends and family. Whenever she could, she and her family would visit her older brother who lives in Alaska, and they would go fishing or on a cruise. “I’m almost 70, now, and I’ve been to a lot of places, done a lot of things, had some heartbreak and had a lot of fun,” she said.
The friends she made along the way are Lowe’s greatest source of inspiration. “I have friends that I’m still in contact with from every job I’ve ever worked on,” she said. “Pretty often we’ll go back to Oklahoma and see friends, or someone will come down this way.”
Lowe’s advice for Dublin graduates is to find a job they like — even if it takes a few tries. “I went from the sewing factory to secretary school to working in the courthouse,” she said. “You’re graduating at 18, and you’re going to work until you’re over 60. You better like your job.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.