Mary Garber

Mary Ellen Garber was born in New York City on April 16, 1916, and graduated from Hollins College in Virginia in 1938. The Twin City Sentinel in Winston-Salem hired her in 1940 as society editor, which in a Southern afternoon paper of that era meant engagements, teas and who had visited whom. It was not what she wanted, but it was the door that was open.

The war opened another. With the newsroom thinning out, she moved to general assignment, and in 1944, when the paper's high school sports stringer enlisted in the Navy, she took his beat. When the men came home she was moved back off it. She kept asking. By 1946 the sports editor, Carlton Byrd, and the managing editor, Nady Cates, had agreed she belonged on the sports desk, and she stayed there for the next fifty-six years.

Her first permanent territory was the one the paper had never covered properly: the Black high schools, Atkins and Carver, and Winston-Salem State, then a teachers' college with a basketball program. Before Garber, results from those schools reached the Sentinel by telephone from a student correspondent, if they reached it at all. From 1946 she went to the games herself, learned the coaches' names and printed them. In segregated North Carolina that was not a neutral act, and the athletes and coaches on that side of town remembered who had shown up.

Basketball became the center of the work, and as the Atlantic Coast Conference formed in the 1950s she covered its schools from the Winston-Salem end. For roughly three decades she was the only woman writing sports in that region and one of a very small number anywhere in the country.

Wake Forest moved its campus to Winston-Salem in 1956, which put an ACC school in her own city and the rest of the conference within a morning's drive. She covered Wake Forest and Winston-Salem State in the same week and gave both the same attention, which was not the custom. Asked late in life how she had ended up in the job, she said she had never considered anything else, and in the same breath that she had never once set out to be a sportswriter. Both statements were true. The work had found her, and she had refused to give it back.

The rules of the trade were built around the assumption that reporters were men. Locker rooms were closed to her, so she stood in the hallway and waited for players and coaches to come out, and sometimes they did not. At North Carolina State games a security guard named John Baker took it upon himself to go in and fetch the athletes she needed. That arrangement, one guard's decency standing in for a policy, was how she got quotes for years.

Nobody called her a pioneer while it was happening. They called her the woman from the Sentinel.

She did not write about the exclusions much. She worked around them, filed, and came back the next night. The Sentinel was absorbed by the morning Winston-Salem Journal in the 1980s and she went with it, retired formally in 1986, and then kept reporting part time for another sixteen years, until 2002. She was eighty-six when she stopped. By then the reporters who had once blocked the locker-room door were retired or dead, and the women who followed her into the profession had organized, sued and won. Garber had simply outlasted the problem.

Recognition began while she was still filing. In 1990 the ACC established the Mary Garber Award for its top female athlete of the year; a girls' basketball tournament in Winston-Salem, the Mary Garber Holiday Tip-Off Classic, had carried her name since 1989. Then the profession caught up with the conference.

The Associated Press Sports Editors had given the Red Smith Award to twenty-four men before they gave it to her in 2005. She died in Winston-Salem on September 21, 2008, at ninety-two. The Association for Women in Sports Media still gives an award with her name on it each year to someone who was, in one way or another, made to wait in the hallway.