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Mary Garber stood very tall in a man's world
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Published: September 22, 2008
The newspaper roster generously listed Mary Garber as 5 feet tall, yet she was the tallest person in almost every room.
Mary, who died yesterday at 92, towered over human prejudice and human smallness.
She wiggled free from the stereotypes and conventions and limitations of her time. She figured out ways to be her own person, to do what she wanted, to do a job she loved.
When the last male, a high-school student turning 18, left the Twin City Sentinel's sports department and joined the Navy during World War II, Mary became the sports editor of the afternoon paper. She relinquished the role once the war ended and soldiers returned to their desks, including Sports Editor Carlton Byrd, but within a year Managing Editor Nady Cates acknowledged her natural instincts and reassigned her to sports.
For nearly 30 years, Mary was the only woman in the state on the sports beat full time. She will go down in history -- big American history, not little local history -- as a newspaper pioneer who represented the simple truth that everyone deserves a fair shot.
She lived that way. She treated others that way, just like her mother taught her. Race didn't matter. Religion didn't matter. Money didn't matter. Gender certainly didn't matter. She would warm up to folks if they acted right, and she would chide them if they behaved badly -- although seldom to their faces and almost never without awarding a second or third chance to demonstrate a modicum of civility.
She lived among some of the richest old people in town without holding their wealth against them. She wrote stories about some of the poorest young people in town without holding their deficiencies against them. She made friends in every neighborhood and carried on grudges in none.
Unlike many public figures who proclaim themselves champions of civil rights, Mary didn't really see people as black or white or brown subdivisions. She saw them as individuals, capable of decency or deceit regardless of race.
After an avalanche of prominent awards and hall-of-fame inductions, Mary recalled her favorite tribute during an interview with Diane K. Gentry for an oral-history project sponsored by the Washington Press Club Foundation. The praise arrived by word of mouth from Mamie Braddy, a police reporter and friend who had lobbied editors to hire Mary. Mrs. Braddy, sitting in the stands at Bowman Gray Stadium during a soap-box derby, overheard a conversation between two black kids about 8 and 10 years old.
The older kid asked the younger one: "Do you see that lady down there on the field?"
"Yes."
"Do you know who she is?"
"No."
"That's Miss Mary Garber. And she don't care who you are or where you're from or what you are. If you do something, she's going to write about you."
The remark's innocent frankness appealed to Mary. "And," she said, "I'd like to have that on my tombstone."
She preferred candor. She would walk over and grin and mention a team I had covered the night before. "They aren't worth a flip, are they?" she'd say. Or maybe she'd use stronger language.
In reflective conversations, Mary brought up what she considered her shortcomings -- as a child football player tackling boys, as a writer tackling descriptive phrases, as a rookie news reporter covering a union drive and as The Sentinel's society-page editor.
"I was definitely not cut out to be society editor," she said. "You'd have to write about women wearing red dresses with flowers. I didn't know diddle-do about that."
Faced with such a story, she recruited a friend who worked in the clothing section of a department store to interpret the fashions as the women paraded by.
Mary preferred pulling up her incurably floppy socks and putting on her tennis shoes. She pulled for the underdog. She often worked like a dog, not because someone ordered her but because that came with the territory.
As a young woman working in a man's world, she couldn't enter locker rooms and hear the original recollections of games just played. She couldn't join the social wing of the sportswriting fraternity until someone asked her, partly because her personal code and shy side precluded Mary from inviting herself.
On her first business trip to Duke, a university she once considered attending because she adored its formidable football team, Mary was denied access to the press box and relegated to a private box filled with chatty coaches' wives and restless children.
An editor at the paper wrote letters to the major North Carolina colleges, which promptly ended that separate-and-unequal sham in 1946. Once inside the press boxes, Mary sometimes suffered the indignity of coarse stage whispers from dim male reporters challenging her professional rights.
"Jackie Robinson was breaking in with the Dodgers about then," she said, citing her hero on the occasion of her official semi-retirement in 1986. "He had to take a lot of crap when he came up. His philosophy was: ‘Do the best job you could and keep your mouth shut. People will eventually respect you.' In my case, eventually, people would say, ‘She's all right.' That's all I really wanted."
The first time I saw Mary, I saw her cap first. It was a tennis cap, a dark model similar to a baseball cap but without the high crown. She wore the cap slightly cocked to one side and pulled down snugly, so that it nearly touched the top of her wire-rimmed glasses and blocked out distractions during the tennis match we were covering.
The second time I saw Mary, I saw her cap first again. It was a knitted wool cap, dark and dense and a bit askew. That seemed strange -- indoors -- but the circumstances were 10 times stranger.
In the chaotic cubbyhole outside the basketball locker rooms at Duke, Mary perched her busy little body on an equipment trunk and waited. She bided her time outside the inner sanctums of male athletics that night, as she usually did back in 1971, and relied on sports-information aides to produce interview subjects. She did not wait patiently, fidgeting in her thick jacket and turning her head constantly.
Amid the swirl of activity -- student managers hauling stacks of towels, reporters hurrying from one locker room to the other, parents and friends squeezing into the remaining square inches -- Mary stood out, even though she was more or less sitting on one foot, the other dangling off the trunk's side.
Finally, a coach approached her, after he had finished talking to other reporters in the locker room. She started asking questions and scribbling down the answers with the blunt nub of a No. 2 pencil. (Over the years, I saw Mary sharpen a thousand pencils, but somehow I never managed to see her use one that had a sharp point.) Every now and then, she would peer over her glasses and curl her lips in her unique way, presaging yet another question.
At the time, as a college student covering the game for a Raleigh newspaper, I didn't think much about what the woman might have gone through to reach that jammed ACC passageway. I didn't even consider her wildly unusual, since about half the journalism students I knew were women, and quite a few reporters at the Raleigh News & Observer. Their equality was assumed -- in concept, if not fact -- but the issue of equal access obviously remained unresolved.
Mary helped resolve it.
Although way overdue, she got her due, including: the presidency of at least two sportswriting groups that had rejected her original applications; the Red Smith Award from Associated Press sports editors; membership in the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame. The Winston-Salem Journal, the ACC and the U.S. Tennis Association named annual awards for her.
She didn't foresee all this as a child, of course. Mary was born at home on Riverside Drive in New York, on April 19, 1916. Her father, Mason Garber, a civil engineer and partner in a family construction company, took on the job of building Winston-Salem's train station in 1924.
The Garbers encouraged their three daughters to keep grandparents informed about their new world. Mary's older sister, Helen, and her younger sister, formally Cornelia but better known as Neely, wrote letters. Mary deemed that quite dull. She made up a newspaper front page and plugged stories into different spots, with headlines. Thus began Garber News, which was the start of a newspaper career that seemed more inevitable as she worked on local school papers and her alma mater, Hollins University (class of 1938).
Mary's older sister became an accomplished pianist, and her younger sister a horseback rider and instructor. Mary became a sportswriter. She remained a Journal sportswriter for 16 years after her retirement, until her eyes and legs gave out, until she had to accept everyday medical care and leave Neely behind at the house.
Mary always gave Neely credit for handling chores that made the newspaper career possible, particularly after their mother became an invalid.
Neely died last fall. After the funeral and the graveside remarks at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, relatives and friends reassembled in a sunny church meeting room to honor Neely's request for a casual celebration.
People lined up to greet Mary, who sat in her wheelchair and carried on one short conversation after another, summoning strength I didn't know she had. Someone brought Mary a plate and a glass.
Folks stood in clusters around the room, talking and eating and drinking for quite a while. The weight of mourning felt lighter, and the memories of Neely felt brighter, and it seemed like the right time to leave.
Walking toward the doorway, I looked back and saw Mary turn her glass upside down and empty it dry. As she lowered the glass, near the end of the exhausting day, there was the hint of a smile.
Mary lived a full and useful life, right to the last drop.
■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com.
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