Longtime Mount Airy News journalist and former Lifestyles Editor Eleanor Powell will be laid to rest today in a service scheduled for 2 p.m. in Mount Airy.
Powell passed away last week at the age of 90.
Powell, known affectionately by her former colleagues at The News as Miss Ellie, said during a 2012 interview that it was a high school internship she began at the age of 17 which set her on her life’s work.
As a high school senior she began working part-time at the paper, typing community news and releases, and writing a weekly column geared toward teenagers.
“I walked into the building when I was 17 and never left,” she said with a laugh in 2012, when she was just days away from retirement.
She did leave the paper before that retirement — on two separate occasions. She married Joe “Pete” Powell in 1949, and after working with The News for a few more years, she and her husband began a family, so Miss Ellie took a few years off to raise her three children, returning to The News when the youngest of the three was old enough to begin school.
In 2007, after having worked at the paper for 47 of the previous 59 years, she retired.
That didn’t last long. Less than a month later, she’d been talked out of retirement by then-publisher Gary Lawrence. She rejoined the staff, taking up her old mantel of Lifestyles editor as well as editor of the popular weekly publication Surry Scene, a…
