Who was Mary Jane Malone, Anyways?

By: Mr. Medlin

Surely you have heard the name Mary Jane Malone in your time at Magnet, whether that time has been only a few months or almost four years. There is a picture of her next to the office on C-Wing, if you haven’t noticed it. What everyone seems to know about her is that she was a former student, and many know that she passed away far too young, at the age of twenty. I would like to tell you about the Mary Jane that I knew, so that we as a Magnet family can better understand why we honor her.

The Malones lived a few houses down from my family on Leo St. in Broadmoor when I was a kid. Like, a small kid—three/four/etc. Their house was our landing spot on Saturday afternoons and evenings after school and work, when we all wanted to be somewhere else. The Malones came to our house too, but I mostly remember being over there. Our families were very close; my parents were great friends with hers, but more than anything, my sister and I just always seemed to want to be around Mary Jane and her brother. We moved when I was four but stayed close, and MJ served as my main babysitter (sometimes sharing duties with Mrs. Carnie) from when I was about eight and she was old enough to watch us.

What I’d like you to know about MJ is that she embodied Magnet-ness in all the best ways. She read and wrote compulsively. She didn’t suffer phoniness and was funny in the kind of way you immediately love. She was subversive and didn’t trust authority, but had amazing relationships with her teachers. One time, she wrote me a song called “The Booger Blues,” and for the only time in my elementary school career, I got in trouble because I performed it on the South Highlands playground.

You don’t talk about boogers. That’s not okay. As a babysitter, she was wonderful. Her favorite thing to do was mix up odd and disparate substances in our kitchen in a big mixing bowl until it looked like human vomit. Then we put it on the sidewalk out front until someone came by and reacted to it. That was the punchline. MJ would have made some marvelous TikToks. Also, she would have hated TikTok. The last memory I have of her is after her freshman year at Texas A&M. We were making nachos and she said, “Please don’t become one of those people who lays out each chip in a neat layer.” I was too ashamed to admit I already was.

Ultimately, we remember Mary Jane for what she meant to Magnet, though. She was the head cheerleader (the team dissolved soon after she graduated, perhaps evidence of how much the team missed her) and one of the most popular kids on campus. At most high schools, this means something very different; here, it meant that everybody...EVERYBODY loved her. Mary Jane was an impossible combination of funny, talented, and smart, and we are proud to remember her through our MJM Book and Scholarship.