Not too small to tackle a man's world: when I grow up, I'd like to know as much diddle-do as Mary does

Sporting News, The, July 8, 2005 by Dave Kindred

As a grown-up, Mary Garber never got much past 5 feet tall and 100 pounds. Imagine how little she was when she was little. Still, when they wouldn't let her play on the school's sixth-grade football team, here's what she thought: "This isn't right."

After all, she was the neighborhood kid who owned a football rulebook. And as de facto coach of the Buena Vista Devils (the BVDs), she had been tackling boys for years. So this sixth-grade thing annoyed her. Rather than pout, she joined an unofficial, ragtag team that took on all comers.

Alas, she came home excited about her makeshift team bumping heads with big boys only to hear her father say, "Absolutely, no."

Mason Garber had taken his daughter to Yankee Stadium to see Babe Ruth. When he moved to North Carolina to build Winston-Salem's railroad station, they went to football games. She was constantly reading, especially about baseball, boxing and football. Everything to be read about Notre Dame and Knute Rockne, she read. "So, see, I was a weird kid," she says.

Disappointing as her father's edict was to her, it did have the salutary effect of keeping little Mary out of harm's way. And, happily, it did nothing to dissuade her from sports. It was 1928. A dozen years later, a philosophy major looking for a real-world job, Mary Garber became society editor of Winston-Salem's afternoon paper for $15 a week.

Society editor? In 1986, reporting on Mary Garber's first pass at retirement, her Winston-Salem Journal colleague Lenox Rawlings wrote a beautiful story. She told him, "I was definitely not cut out to be society editor. ... You'd have to write about women wearing lacy red dresses with flowers. I didn't know diddle-do about that."

World War II depleted her newspaper's sports department. For a year, she became the sports department. When the men returned, she went to the news side, but by habit and for pleasure she wrote so many sports stories on her own time that an editor told her to just stay in sports.

She stayed in that man's world, the sportswriting of the '40s, and she stayed despite some men treating her poorly. She told Rawlings, "Jackie Robinson was breaking in with the Dodgers about then. 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.' "

That, she did.

And that, they did.

She wrote kindly of others and was critical of her own work. She did brave things not to do brave things but because she saw things and said, "This isn't right." A woman in a man's world, she was also a white person in a black world. In the '40s, when her newspaper practiced separate-but-equal journalism that produced "Negro" pages, she covered events at Winston-Salem's black schools with her stories appearing in the regular run of the newspaper, not at the back of the bus.

Her nephew, Dr. Daniel Brown, of Twin Falls, Idaho, said two young black men saw Garber at a game. "One asked, 'Who is she, and what's she doing here?' The other one ..." Here Brown stopped. He couldn't speak. He closed his eyes against tears, then half-whispered through the emotion. "The other one said, 'She's a sportswriter, and if you do something good, she'll write what you did.' "

She wrote about high schools, colleges, pros, baseball, basketball, football, tennis. It took about a half-century for people to catch on. Then came roasts, toasts, testimonials, even Today, Good Morning America and a phone call that Journal assistant sports editor Phil Hrichak overheard.

"Yes, this is she," Mary Garber said. "Appear on what?

"What time?

"No, I don't think I'm interested, thanks for calling."

Hrichak said, "What was the name of the show?"

"David something, in New York at night. I don't know."

"David Letterman?"

"That's it."

"It's pretty big, like Johnny Carson, about 11:30 at night."

"Good thing I said no," Garber said. "I'm asleep by then, anyway."

After mandatory retirement at age 70, she worked more than her part-time contract paid. Journal sports editor Terry Oberle said, "We probably still owe her." Because everyone in my business owes her a bow, last week she received sports journalism's highest honor, the Red Smith Award.

She's now 89 and can't travel. We saw her on videotape, a little woman in a ball cap. She was frail and weak, and in her determination to be heard she was so damned strong that we understood Dr. Brown's tears. It was wonderful that she did the tape. More wonderful was what she said, which is that it's important to seek out life's challenges.

That, Mary Garber did.