Mary Garber

Mary Ellen Garber (April 19, 1916 – September 21, 2008) was an American sportswriter, who was a pioneer among women sportswriters. She received over 40 writing awards and numerous honors in a sports-writing career that spanned seven decades, the most prestigious of which was the 2005 Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) Red Smith Award. Garber, the first woman to win the APSE award, also became the first woman to be inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame in 2002.

She was born in New York City in 1916, but relocated to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her family in 1924. At the age of eight, she had two passions: journalism and sports. She not only read the sports page, she played football—tackle football—for the Buena Vista Devils. As she matured, her five-foot, ninety-pound frame limited her to softball and tennis, but her love of sports never slackened. While other girls swooned over movie stars, Garber, a huge Knute Rockne fan, wrote letters to Notre Dame football players.

Garber graduated from Hollins College in Virginia, in 1938, with one goal: to become a newspaper reporter. In an interview with local historian Frank Tursi, Garber said, "I never considered anything else. But never at any time did I think about being a sportswriter".

In 1940, the aspiring reporter entered journalism as the society editor at the Twin City Sentinel. America's entry into World War II created a vacuum in the newspaper that enabled her to become a general assignment reporting. Later in 1944, when the high school sports stringer at the paper graduated and enlisted in the U.S. Navy, Garber filled his slot. At the end of the war, she moved back to general assignment reporting but not for long. After a year of dogging sports editor Carlton Bryd for sports assignments, both Bryd and managing editor, Nady Cates, agreed: Garber belonged on the sports beat.

...
Wikipedia