How Mary Garber, the South’s first female sportswriter, got her start at Hollins.
Photo above: Courtesy of Digital Commons of Hollins University
The Roanoke Valley helped springboard the career of one of the most consequential figures in the history of sports journalism. Mary Garber was certainly the first full-time female sportswriter in the southeast and may have been the first in the country. “Miss Mary,” as she was known in North Carolina, spent more than 60 years writing for a succession of Winston-Salem publications: the Twin City Sentinel, the Winston-Salem Sentinel, and the Winston-Salem Journal. She got her start at Hollins College, where she pursued her passion to become a writer and found a welcoming and like-minded community of ambitious young women.
“She wasn’t a crusader. She wasn’t yelling at people. But she was strong and she didn’t back down,” said Mark Whicker, who was Garber’s colleague at the Winston-Salem Journal from 1974 until 1977.
“She was always on the way to getting something done. She was on the phone. She was driving somewhere to interview somebody. She was covering something. She was in perpetual motion,” said Lenox Rawlings, a fellow sportswriter who worked with Garber for decades at the Winston-Salem Journal.
Garber was born in New York City in 1916. Her father Mason Garber was a Virginia native. He was a prominent civil engineer and contractor who had studied at the Virginia Military Institute. Her mother Grace was a New York City debutante. Mary had an older sister named Helen and a younger sister named Neely. The Garbers relocated frequently until settling in Winston-Salem in 1924.
Garber decided at age 8 that she wanted to be a sportswriter. As a child, she wrote letters to Notre Dame football players and received many replies. She gloried in the sports page, developing a love of boxing and football before broadening her interests to virtually every athletic pursuit. As a child, she and her sisters kept her grandparents in New Jersey updated on the family’s doings in North Carolina by mailing them a newspaper of their own creation, The Garber News. When Mary discovered libraries, she found them to be a remarkable repository of sports books.
“[My parents] encouraged creativity and debate. We would have great discussions about politics and music and literature,” Garber said in a 1990 interview with the Washington Press Club. She recalled spending endless childhood days with her family playing games, attending movies, and going to Duke, North Carolina, and Davidson football games. For a time, Garber even played on a neighborhood tackle football team called the Buena Vista Devils. Garber’s stature (she stood less than five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds) limited her options as a competitive athlete.
She attended Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, wrote for the school newspaper, and played softball, tennis, and track. At the time, her sister Helen was attending Hollins, where she studied piano and music theory. Upon graduation, Mary followed in her sister’s footsteps.
“I wanted to go to Duke, and I’m afraid my reason was that they had a good football team,” Garber said in 1990. “My father thought I was too young to go to a big university. He said if I went to Hollins for two years that I could transfer. After two years, I didn’t want to transfer.
“I knew every girl in school by name,” Garber said. “There were 90 girls in my freshman class [at Hollins].”
Garber majored in philosophy while finding other outlets for her writing. She took several creative writing classes, worked on the yearbook, and wrote all four years for the student newspaper. She served as editor her senior year.
“I was a big fish in a very small pond,” she said of her time as editor.
“I majored in philosophy because I planned to go into newspaper work, and I thought it was important to have as broad an education as possible. I think that it is better preparation for newspaper work to have a wide variety of courses than it is to go to journalism school,” Garber said.
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