If the mother ever did sleep, her youngest daughter didn’t see it. There always was too much for Sarah Nixon to do, with her newspaper writing and volunteer work, raising four children and hand-sewing their clothes.

“She would go to sleep after she put us to bed, and she would get up before we got up,” Murray Nixon, 55, said. “My mother was never sick, never had a headache. You never saw her on the couch dozing during the day. She was in the kitchen a lot, and always cooked from scratch for us.”

Sarah Nixon, 90, spent a lifetime doing for others. Her resume lists nearly five decades of composing newspaper stories about people and events that shaped Mount Holly, and nearly seven decades of volunteer service to help shape the world.

She still belongs to two circles at her church, drives her own car, and can repair anything that will succumb to a hammer and Phillips head screwdriver. She lives in the same home she and her husband, Roy, built 60 years ago, just over the county line from Stanley.

“When I look back, my mom was very frugal. She could stretch a dime,” Murray Nixon said. “She gave awards to the high school, sent lunches to people at my dad’s office who couldn’t afford it … she just did it. She didn’t want attention or glory; she just felt it was her gift that the Lord put her here to do. She is a very loving friend and mother.”

Sarah Nixon is most known for the newspaper part, the one role in her life that caught her by surprise.

After graduating from Mount Holly High School in 1940, she found work on third shift at Stowe Thread Mill, during World War II. She married Roy Nixon in 1947, on her 24th birthday, and the couple had four children – Clifton (1950), Susan (1952), Kathy (1955) and Miriam, a.k.a. Murray (1958).

She always liked newspapers and subscribed to the old Charlotte News and Mount Holly News and read them front to back.

When Sarah Nixon was 34, a gentleman named Guy Leedy came to call.

Leedy was publisher of the Lincoln Times and Lincoln County News, and he was looking for a writer. “He had been to the old Lowe’s hardware store, and someone suggested he come talk to me. I don’t know why they told him that,” Nixon said. “Maybe because I was active in the community.”

It was 1957, and Leedy sat on Nixon’s couch and talked about community correspondence. “When he came to call that morning, he gave me a stack of paper, and he said to use all I needed and to write clearly and to print the names,” she said. “I wrote by hand. He said he had plenty of that paper. That’s how I started. I didn’t have a typewriter or anything.”

She called Mason Rodden, editor of the Mount Holly News, and asked him to use her stories in his paper, if she included Lucia and Riverbend news. It was the start of 44 years with the News. On Nixon’s birthday that year, 1959, she wrote her first-ever feature story – a piece on the police chief’s wife.

 “If you talk to anyone about me, they’ll remember the ‘Personally Mentioned’ column, but I ended up as news editor and did the whole paper between editors. I did everything,” she said, “sports, city council, everything for years and years, until I retired about five years ago.”

Among Nixon’s accomplishments:

* Forty-four years with the Mount Holly News, as Society Editor, then Women’s Editor, and 42 years as author of the ‘Personally Mentioned’ column;

* General News reporter, covering civic organizations, clubs, schools, sports, church news, and 30 years of City Council meetings. (“It was like watching the city’s history unfold,” she said.)

* Worked four years as a writer for the Mountain Island Monitor;

* Was president of the North Carolina Press Women’s Association, which met annually at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill;

* Joined a Home Demonstration Club (now Extension and Community Association) in Gaston County in April 1947, starting a 64-year span of volunteer work to help women, children and families in cooperation with the North Carolina Family and Consumer Sciences Department and U.S. Department of Agriculture. She traveled as a delegate to conferences in Africa, the Netherlands, Tasmania and Australia;

* Helped organize the Mount Holly Extension and Community Association Club, which won a Mount Holly Community Service Award in 2008;

* Was editor of TarHeel Homemaker, a statewide newspaper for the Extension and Community Association, for 20 years;

* Was a 4-H leader, and involved her four children in 4-H activities. She also took her daughters to dance and piano lessons.

Nixon bought herself a manual typewriter and taught herself to use it. For her 75th birthday, her children bought her a computer.

“Momma worked from home a lot and went into the office maybe one day a week, and she would take us with her in the summers,” Murray Nixon said. “So, she was always there. Between her and my dad, when it came to us kids, they were always there.”

Roy Nixon, who died in 2002, worked for McClure Lumber Company until he retired in 1980. “They loved retirement,” Murray Nixon said. “They gardened, and mom canned and froze. And to this day, she still crochets a lot. She makes baby afghans for all the nieces and nephews.”

Her favorite part about the newspaper business, Sarah Nixon said, was doing feature stories about people, fascinating people. “That’s the main thing I enjoyed, giving a little bit of credit to the ones who are behind the winners, the ones who may have missed out on the top awards,” she said. “I think that may be why people liked what I was writing. If you’re interested in life around you, you’ll be fine.”

But if you ask Sarah Nixon about her greatest accomplishment, she doesn’t mention anything about a job, or writing, or traveling, or organizing.

“I guess my four children and my marriage are my greatest accomplishment,” she said. “If you talk about ‘smother love,’ I get it. I guess the good Lord walked with me every day of my life. I had a good, supportive husband. He never complained. We worked together. We had a lot of fun in our family. If you’re doing for others, you’ll do all right.”