As Mary Lou Werner she won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting (Edition Time) for her Evening Star coverage of the 1958 school integration crisis in Virginia[1] in the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court of the United States decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Briefly, she attended the University of Maryland, College Park, where she majored in math but was forced to drop out due to financial considerations.

Senator Harry F. Byrd and followed by Governor of Virginia J. Lindsay Almond, who had proclaimed in his 1958 inaugural address that "integration anywhere means destruction everywhere".

Under the constant pressure of meeting deadlines at an afternoon paper that published five editions daily, she reported on a rapidly progressing story over the course of a year, compiling information from late-breaking court actions and other events and synthesizing them into a coherent story.

"[5] She was named as the commentary page editor at the Times in 1984, two years after it was established, where she helped foster the career of conservative commentator and pundit Cal Thomas, whose columns first appeared in the paper in the mid-1980s.