Mary Garber, longtime Journal sportswriter, dies

Share your memories of Mary Garber.

Several months ago, a minister was making the rounds at the Brookridge Retirement Village where Mary Garber was a resident.

He asked Mary what she had in mind for a spiritual reward in heaven.

"Football season," Mary answered.

Mary Garber's football season began early this afternoon when she died at the age of 92.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

Mary Garber was a sportswriter for the Winston-Salem Journal and the Twin City Sentinelfrom 1946 through 1997. As far as can be determined, she was probably the first fulltime woman 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. She was totally dedicated to journalism — good journalism — and to the Journal, in that order.

But she was just as devoted to her family, to her friends from every walk of life and to Winston-Salem. She loved this city, tobacco and all, although she swore she never smoked.

Mary was born in New York in 1916, but her father moved the family to Winston-Salem in 1924, to the house on Stratford Road where Mary and her younger sister, Cornelia (Neely) stayed after their parents died. An older sister, Helen, married and moved to Colorado.

Mary was the neighborhood tomboy, the quarterback, she always said, for her Buena Vista football team. Quarterbacks must have been a lot shorter then. Mary was barely five feet tall as an adult.

She was also 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 Twin City Sentinel, in the Society Department. That was during World War II, and when the all-male ranks of the sports department of the Sentinel were depleted, Mary became a sportswriter because she knew more about the subject than any of the other women on the newspapers' staffs.

By the time the men returned to the paper, it had become apparent that Mary knew as much as they did about sports, too, and she was moved to the Sentinel Sports Department in 1946.
It wasn't quite that simple, of course.

Sportswriters at some of the other newspapers in the state were not as receptive of a female sportswriter as were the editors of the Journal. Mary and the Sentinel had to fight for her seat in the press boxes and on the press rows of North Carolina. They won, and so did sports journalism.

That has been the most celebrated aspect of Mary's career, but it hardly defined her. She lived here, and that meant she knew and remembered the people she wrote about. In turn, they remembered her, and the stories she wrote about them.

She 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.

Gaines' basketball teams were powerhouses at the College Division level, and this is ACC country. But Mary introduced the players — most of whom were from out of state — and their coach to the Journal's readers. She and Gaines became fast friends, more than friends, really. They referred to each other in later years as "brother" and "sister."

Gaines was finally accorded the recognition he had earned, thanks in part to Mary's coverage of his accomplishments.

Mary also overcame her early obstacles and was recognized for her courage and her dedication to her profession. She has been named to several halls of fame, including the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and, most recently, the National Sportscasters and Sportwriters Hall of Fame.

Many writing awards and scholarships across the country have been named in her honor, most of which salute women in journalism.

Mary was preceded in death by 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.