Mule’s marks 50 years as local Catholic retailer

Pictured above: Hubie Mule stands in front of his family-founded buisiness – Mule’s Religious Books and Gifts – which is currently marking its 50th year of service to area Catholics. (Photos by Beth Donze, Clarion Herald)

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

Hubert “Hubie” Mule remembers walking on the levee with his wife Kay in the late 1980s, pondering the future of their eponymous office supply business. At the time, the shelves inside their retail store on David Drive in Metairie, which opened in 1973, predominantly were stocked with traditional office supplies, with a modest area devoted to religious books and other small articles of faith.

The Mules, both active Catholics who had been inspired by a recent pilgrimage to Medjugorje, felt a calling from God to add a full range of religious supplies to the store but were panicking about how they would be able to pay for their first large order of religious articles.

It was then that Kay made a confession to her husband out on the levee.

“She told me she had been putting aside money for our son Stephen’s college education,” and the business could use the funds to pay for the order and replace it when sales picked up, Hubie said.

A sign they were moving their business in the right direction emerged a few months later when a reimbursement check from a long-forgotten debtor unexpectedly showed up in the mail, 12 years after the debtor had declared bankruptcy. The kicker: the Mules were reimbursed for the exact amount they had withdrawn from their son’s college fund to pay for the religious articles shipment, down to the dollar.

“So we put the money back in Stephen’s account, and he went on to college and graduated,” Mule said. “Who collects on a 12-year-old bankrupt account?”

More than just a store

Currently marking its 50th anniversary, Mule’s has since gone full circle – selling faith-related items only – in its most recent iteration as Mule’s Religious Books and Gifts.

Offering a wide selection of sacrament-related gifts, religious greeting cards and pictures, statues, Bibles, rosaries, crucifixes, books and DVDs, business ebbs and flows with the liturgical seasons. In addition to a busy Advent and a year-round demand for baptismal gifts, the store’s busiest time falls between Ash Wednesday and Mother’s Day, due to the many first Communions and confirmations.

“This store is a ministry,” Mule said, noting that customers regularly place their prayer petitions on the altar in Mule’s in-store chapel. “We’re not professional counselors, but we do direct people to different devotions in the Catholic Church that (our customers) take with them and help in their conversion. The people who come in here will knock your socks off all day long!”

Faith unites couple

Raised in Lakeview, Hubie Mule graduated from St. Dominic School and St. Aloysius High School’s class of 1960,  joining the Navy at 17 to serve on an aircraft carrier as a captain’s yeoman and communications technician. He grew up watching his widowed father support his family of three children at his French Quarter office supplies retailer Mule-Durel, Inc. After four years learning the ropes at an “eight-football-field-long” wholesale business, Mule opened his own store on David Drive and has never left that location.

While he was attending meetings of a Catholic theology group composed of students from Louisiana State University New Orleans (now UNO), Mule noticed Kay Richoux of Chalmette sitting in the back of the classroom.

“I had my eye on her the whole time, but she never knew I existed,” he laughed. They finally had a chance to talk at a Catholic retreat in Arkansas.

“She came home in my 1955 Chevrolet, and the rest is history,” Mule said, noting that the two were married on Jan. 23, 1965 – a date they later learned was the accepted date of Mary and Joseph’s wedding.

“We had no idea,” Hubie said. “Just like we had no idea that the day we opened the store – May 1 – was the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker. It seems like he’s been working with us all these 50 years and helping us!”

Pilgrims take flight

Hubie credits Kay, who left her 15-year career as a medical technologist to help at Mule’s, for making the business finally turn a profit two years in.

“She’s so smart,” Hubie said. “She does all the purchasing of the religious supplies; I put all the merchandise up, and I take care of the business end, as far as paying the bills and keeping things straight in that area.”

During a 1984 family pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Mules met Father Ron Mathews, a Texas-based priest who told them about the Marian apparitions in Medjugorje, a village located in then-Yugoslavia. When they got home, Mule bought a wall crucifix from the Daughters of St. Paul and placed it in plain view of his customers. Books on Medjugorje started “flying out the window,” he said.

Mule was able to take his whole family to Medjugorje in 1986. To date, the couple has made 29 pilgrimages to major sites all over the world, including 14 to Medjugorje and eight to the Holy Land.

“My wife was really touched in Medjugorje – blown away,” said Hubie, noting that the 

experience led Kay to launch a monthly newsletter in 1987 called “The Medjugorje Star.” Inaugural issues were sent to their travel companions, but demand ultimately grew to mailings to 40,000 households.

“When we first started the newsletter (before the era of desktop publishing), 35 volunteers would spend three days a month just getting it to the post office,” Hubie said of the Star, which features a reflection from Father Mathews and news of continuing revelations that flow out of the sacred place on the 25th of each month.

Although mailing costs were hefty, “never, ever have I had a problem paying the bill,” Mule said. The free newsletter – now published every two months and mailed to 10,000 households and numerous email subscribers – is supported by sales of advertised religious items and voluntary donations in which readers will show their support by adding “$10 or $20 to an order,” Mule said.

Chapel graces

In 1990, the Mules’ ministry to Catholic families was enhanced by the completion of a two-pew, in-store chapel for the celebration of weekly Mass by a visiting priest. The chapel was named “Srebrenica” – Croatian for “Silver Chapel” – after a chapel in Medjugorje that was built over a site used by local Catholics to hide church treasures during Yugoslavia’s Communist regime.

Featuring stained-glass and painted renditions of Our Lady of Medjugorje and a display case of more than a dozen first-class relics, the chapel hosts fewer Masses these days but continues to host twice-a-day prayer and a Tuesday-afternoon Bible study. Moments of grace there include two baptisms.

Hubie said one of his most cherished chapel-related memories is of the time one of his employees called him on a Saturday to ask if he knew a priest who would be willing to hear the confession of an 88-year-old woman who hadn’t received the sacrament since her first Communion. As luck would have it, a priest was visiting the Mule home and dashed to the store.

“(The priest) said it was the biggest confession he had ever heard in his life, and he had been a priest for over 50 years,” Mule said. “And she converted – 80 years since her last confession – and now this woman was going to go to heaven!”

Outreach to war victims

Over the years, the Mules, both 80, have served as lectors, extraordinary ministers of holy Communion and marriage prep ministers at St. Matthew the Apostle in River Ridge, their parish of 44 years. Third-order Dominicans since 1991, Hubie and Kay also coordinated 13 years of weekly “Peace Masses” at their parish and led weekend retreats at the Ave Maria Retreat House in Crown Point.

In the early 1990s, the couple helped feed Yugoslavians victimized by civil war, joining with local Croatians for the “Feed My Sheep” effort. In all, the group would ship 49 containers of food, medical supplies and clothing for distribution in the war zone by Franciscan Friars.

Mule said his and Kay’s biggest challenge is the technology involved in keeping their six-days-a-week business humming as they enter their 80s.

“It is a monster job to keep the store stocked. We have 300 active suppliers,” said Mule, noting that his biggest sellers are statues of St. Joseph – typically purchased by homeowners and realtors seeking a “divine assist” in selling their homes. To discourage superstitious thinking, every purchaser receives a St. Joseph holy card at checkout.

“We try to explain to them not to use (the statue) like it’s some magic thing, and to (instead) say a prayer asking for St. Joseph’s intercession,” Mule said. “You don’t have to bury him; you don’t have to face him a certain way; you don’t have to put him upside down. We try to keep them kind of balanced with it.”

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