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Goodbye, Mary: For her spiritual reward? 'Football season,' she said
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Mary Garber
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Published: September 22, 2008
Updated: 09/23/2008 04:44 pm
Several months ago, a minister was making the rounds at Brookridge Retirement Village where Mary Garber was a resident.
He asked her what she had in mind for a spiritual reward in heaven.
"Football season," she answered.
Mary Garber's football season began yesterday, when she died at the age of 92.
Garber was a sportswriter for the Winston-Salem Journal and the Twin City Sentinel
from 1946 through 1997. As far as can be determined, she was probably the first full-time female sportswriter at a daily newspaper in the country, and she certainly had the longest career.
That's how she will be remembered by most people, as a female pioneer in a male-dominated profession.
Garber was born in New York in 1916, but her father moved the family to Winston-Salem in 1924. Garber was the neighborhood tomboy, the quarterback, she always said, for her Buena Vista football team. Quarterbacks must have been a lot shorter then. Garber was barely 5 feet tall as an adult.
She also was a fan, most rabidly of football and Knute Rockne, in particular, but then of baseball and basketball.
She graduated from Reynolds High School and then Hollins College in Salem, Va. She came back to Winston-Salem and got a job with the Sentinel. That was during World War II, and when the all-male ranks of the sports department of the Sentinel were depleted, Garber became a sportswriter because she knew more about sports than any of the other women on the newspapers' staffs.
By the time the men returned to the paper, it had become apparent that Garber knew as much as they did about sports, too, and she was moved to the Sentinel's sports department in 1946.
It wasn't quite that simple.
Sportswriters at some of the other newspapers in the state were not receptive to a female sportswriter. She and the Sentinel had to fight for her seat in the press boxes of North Carolina. They won those fights.
That became the most celebrated aspect of Garber's career, but it hardly defined her.
Claudette Weston, a friend of Garber's since 1951, summed up her legacy.
"She was for all the people," she said. "Mary just had that giving way about her and it didn't matter how rich or poor you were."
Garber wrote about everyone, it seems, from Everett Case to Mike Krzyzewski to the last kid on the bench on a high-school baseball team. But she found a niche and a best friend when she started covering Winston-Salem State sports. No one else really was at the time, and WSSU noticed -- especially Coach Clarence "Big House" Gaines.
She and Gaines became fast friends. They referred to each other in later years as "brother" and "sister."
Gaines, who died in April 2005, was finally accorded the recognition he had earned, thanks in part to Garber's coverage of his accomplishments.
Clara Gaines, the widow of Big House, said that Garber and Big House had a special relationship because they worked so closely.
She said that when Garber started covering WSSU basketball, her husband had one rule for his players.
"When she was around they had to act like gentlemen and if they didn't, House would let them have it," she said.
She said that it's easy to define Garber's legacy.
"She wrote about everybody and knew everybody and she saw no color," Gaines said. "She didn't have a color barrier."
Billy Packer, a former basketball player at Wake Forest and former CBS analyst, said that Garber never had her own agenda.
"She never looked for the credit, but she probably never got the credit in terms of being a breakthrough person on a national basis like today would be exposed everywhere," Packer said. "But you know she was never looking for that."
Garber was preceded in death by her sisters Helen and Neely, who died last year. She is survived by a niece, Nancy Bauschinger of Vallejo, Calif.; nephews and their wives, Daniel and Noanie Brown of Twin Falls, Idaho, David and Carol Brown of Piedmont, Calif., and Jonathan and Quinlan Brown of Fair Oaks, Calif.; and several grand nieces and nephews.
A memorial service will be held Saturday at 11 a.m. at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Summit Street.
The service is open to the public.
■ Terry Oberle recently retired as Journal sports editor.
■ Journal reporters John Delong and John Dell contributed to this story.
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