'Miss Mary' Garber, longtime sportswriter who paved way for women in the field, dies at 92
The only woman to win sports journalism's highest award, Garber covered athletics at a time when most women were relegated to the society pages and banned from locker rooms.
When the men of America went off to fight in World War II, the sports editor at the Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem, N.C., went with them. Mary Garber, a sports fan growing up, stepped in and took his place. When he returned from the war, he reclaimed his job and Garber returned to her pre-war assignment on the society pages.
But she wasn't done with sports. The newspaper's editors decided she knew more about football and basketball than she did about fashion, and in 1946 they moved her back to the sports department. She continued to report on athletics for more than 40 years, paving the way for hundreds of female sportswriters.
Garber, the only woman to win sports journalism's highest honor, the Red Smith Award given annually by the Associated Press Sports Editors, died Sunday afternoon at a retirement home in Winston-Salem. She was 92.
Mary Garber obituary: The obituary of pioneering female sportswriter Mary Garber in Monday's California section indicated that Duke University was a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1946. Duke competed in the Southern Conference before the ACC was formed in 1953. The obituary also said Garber reported on the Winston-Salem Red Sox in the 1940s. At that time, the city's minor league baseball team was the Cardinals.
Miss Mary, as she was known in Winston-Salem, worked as a full-time sportswriter at the Sentinel and then the Winston-Salem Journal until 1986, when she was required to retire at age 70. She worked part time until 2002.
In 2005 she received the Red Smith Award, which since 1981 has been given annually for major contributions to sports journalism. Previous winners include the late Times columnist Jim Murray, former Times sports editor Bill Dwyre, who is now a columnist, and broadcaster Dick Schaap.
Garber wasn't the first female sportswriter, according to David Kaszuba, an associate professor of communications at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania who has studied those pioneering women. Most notably, Margaret Goss wrote about women's sports for the New York Herald Tribune in the 1920s.
At a time when most women journalists covered only women's sports or the "women's angle," Garber broke the mold, Kaszuba said.
"She wrote about sports very regularly, she covered both men's and women's sports and she had a 40- or 50-year career."
In her early days as a sportswriter she was assigned mostly to high school sports, and she recalled running up and down the sidelines at football games wearing a skirt, in the era before pants were acceptable attire for women.
She went on to cover a wide spectrum of sports, including football, basketball, baseball, track and field, tennis, volleyball, softball, swimming and wrestling, and at recreational, high school and college levels. There were few opportunities to cover professional sporting events in North Carolina at the time, but she did write about minor league baseball, international track and field competitions, and the Davis Cup international tennis tournament.
