Mary Garber: Interview #5

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Gentry: This is a conversation with Mary Garber who has covered sports for her Winston-Salem, North Carolina, newspaper for nearly fifty years. She's well-known nationally for her work and is often called the dean of women sportswriters.

Mary, most journalists move around to a lot of different places and different jobs every few years. You've lived in the same family home in Winston-Salem since you were eight years old, sixty-six years, and you've worked on the same newspaper for fifty years. That's continuity. What advantages has that continuity given you in your career?

Garber: Well, I've had continuity in that I've worked on the same newspaper for fifty years but I've done such a wide variety of jobs and worked with such a wide variety of collection of city editors and editors and publishers, I've worked as a society editor—that was how I began—I've worked in general news, I'd work on a morning and an evening paper, and on both those papers I covered every beat that is available on our newspaper. And then I've worked in sports for about forty-six years, I think it is. So I've had a wide variety of jobs even though I've lived in the same community. Obviously, it's been a bit of an advantage to live in the same community because I can call up people and say, "Remember when we were in Wiley School in third grade together and played tag at recess," and he may well at this time be the mayor of Winston-Salem. So it helps to have lived in one community.

Gentry: Well, you were born in New York City in 1916. How did your family decide to move to Winston-Salem?

Garber: My father was a contractor and civil engineer and we came to Winston-Salem to build a railroad station which is now no longer in use, it's some kind of an automobile repair shop now. But that was what we came to build and then we stayed and our construction company built a variety of buildings and residences in Winston-Salem.

Gentry: You stem from a real prominent family of trailblazers; they all seem to be trailblazers in their field. Tell me about your two grandfathers.

Garber: I don't know that you'd call them trailblazers or not, I think that I come from a family of high individualists in which all of us did whatever we were most interested in. My grandfather on my mother's side was a doctor and he got very much interested in the New York fire department. And as a boy he had an organization of his friends. In order to join it, you hadd to be able to name every firebox in the city of New York. Obviously back in the 1890s that was not near as big a task as it is now. And later, he outfitted his own ambulance and answered every big fire in New York City for many, many years. He was an authority on burns. He used to crawl in under the buildings when they were burning and give shots to firemen and give them first aid. And after he retired as an actual physician with the fire department, he was a deputy commissioner and he had a fireman to drive him. And my mother used to love to go to the theater with him because the firemen would park right in front of the theater even if there was a fire hydrant there and you could do anything you wanted to with a fireman driving you.

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did for me was that she kept house and looked after my parents when they got older. And I would never have been able to do the things I did if she hadn't done those things because she was home to see that all the things got done at home and that my parents were looked after and if I didn't get home in time for supper, why, she was there to see that they got fed and everything was taken care of. And I just couldn't have done it without her.

Gentry: It was a tremendous help. What are some of the things you enjoyed doing as a family?

Garber: Well, we used to go to football—I don't remember that we went to basketball games. I know we went to football games and baseball games. And one of the things we used to do on Sunday nights, we would get some kind of a theme for the evening and then everybody would have to dress up like that theme. I remember one time the theme was books and my sister stuck a pillow in her front and came as "The Shape of Things to Come." Another time we were political figures and she dressed up as Clyde Hoey, who was "the lusty wind for Carolina." It was really sort of a fun thing and we took turns choosing what the theme was going be.

Then another thing we did, on New Year's Eve we used to sit down in the dining room and each one of us would sit in a chair. The other members of the family would tell us what you'd done well during the year and what you needed to work on. And that included our parents, our mother and father got up there in the chair and we told them what they had done well and what best we thought they needed to work on. It's not very often that a ten-year-old tells her mother or father what she should do.

Gentry: No, I can see there's a lot of discussion between your family and also a lot of creativity there.

Garber: Very much so.

Gentry: What are some of the foundations you have learned in childhood that have carried over into your work as a journalist?

Garber: I think the big thing is—of course, I think that one thing was my mother's teaching that all people should be treated equally and all people should be treated with courtesy and kindness. I think that was important. But l think the best thing that my parents gave me was the appreciation that no matter who you are or what you are, be the best that you can be. My mother used to tell me, don't compare yourself to somebody else but compare yourself to what you are and what you think you can accomplish. I think that's very important for everybody.

Gentry: When did you decide you wanted to be a newspaper reporter? And do you remember why?

Garber: I have no idea why. In fact, I think when I began and had the first ambition to be a newspaper reporter, I didn't even know what a newspaper reporter was. I think it all started when we moved down to Winston-Salem from Ridgewood. And as most children, I was required to write letters back to my grandparents. And my older sister and my younger sister used to sit down and write, "Dear Grandma and Grandpa." I thought that was very dull and very boring. So I set up a newspaper which I called the Garber News and I just did it on a plain sheet of notebook paper and put the family news in it, that the dog had chased the cat up the tree and that Neely had stepped on a tack or stubbed her toe and anything that you would write ordinarily to a relative, only I did it as a newspaper.

Gentry: Didn't you actually break in the stories and put headlines and lay it out like a newspaper?

Garber: Oh, yes. I laid it out just exactly like a newspaper and there were headlines and I put in the school was going to close and I was going to be free of school all the rest of the year.

Gentry: So there must have been newspapers around your house all the time—

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institution, I wanted to go there because they had a good football team. And that was not a very good reason, of course. But I was only—I think I was seventeen, maybe sixteen, and my father thought I was too young to go to a big university. So he told me if I would go to Hollins for two years that at the end of my sophomore year, if I wanted to go to Duke, he would make no objection to me transferring. And of course I got up to Hollins and just absolutely fell in love with the place and was crazy about it. And he couldn't have dragged me away from Hollins at the end of my sophomore year if he'd come up there and tried to haul me away. I wouldn't have gone to Duke for anything in this world.

Gentry: What did Hollins give you that a big place like Duke might not have?

Garber: Hollins gave me very much the same things I got in my home. It gave me the feeling that I could accomplish things, it gave me the feeling that I had abilities. There was a very close faculty-student relationship. I had some very, very dear friends on the faculty and I felt that I could go to them and talk my problems with them and just gab about anything that was interesting me. And it gave me the opportunity to serve in a variety of activities. I was president of the athletic association, I competed in sports, I was on the legislative council, I was in both of the honorary societies, was editor of the newspaper, and I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do all those things in a big school. I was a big fish in a very small pond. But it did a great deal for me.

Gentry: You graduated in 1938, I think, and the country was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression at that point. What was the situation in newspaper employment there? How long did it take you to get a job at a newspaper?

Garber: There weren't any jobs at all. I got out in the spring of 1938 and I tried everywhere to get a job. And there just wasn't one available, nothing. And so I spent the first year after I got out of college working with the recreation program at Summit School which was a private school here. And that consisted of playing basketball and soccer and kickball and even teaching dancing and riding to the kids after school. And I did that for a year and then I decided there was certainly no future in doing anything like that. So I didn't do anything until about February of 1940 which was about a year and a half after I got out of school.

I'd been going down to the newspaper every few weeks saying, "Don't you have something I can do? "Isn't there something I can do?" And the management of the Sentinel called me and asked me if I would like to do a survey of the women's news. And he said he would give me a list of subscribers and I could go around the northwest area and ask them how they liked the women's news of the Journal and Sentinel.

Now, there was one very small catch to that and that was I didn't have a car. And there was another very small catch, I didn't know how to drive. So I wasn't going to miss a chance to have a job and I talked with my dad. And he took a laborer off one of his construction jobs and loaned me his Plymouth and the man drove me around. And he was making more money than I was doing it. And then about a month after that, Art King called me and asked me if I would like to be society editor for the Sentinel. And I got $60 a month for doing it. Some of the kids now say "Why in the world would you work for $60 a month?" And the reason I worked for $60 a month was that was $60 a month more than I was ever going to get, was getting at the time.

Gentry: How did you like being society editor?

Garber: At the time I was so happy only to work for a newspaper, I would have done anything. If they could have given me a broom and let me sweep around there, I would have done it. But I wasn't really the typical society editor because society editors usually spend all their time talking to the four hundred or, you know, the real high society people. But I didn't do just that—of course, I did cover Society with a capital "s" but I also wrote club meetings. I even wrote an article on how to watch football which was rather unusual.

And I remember one horrible experience I had, I had to cover a dance at one of our downtown clubs. In the past, the society editor had gone there to describe what Mrs. Jones had and Mrs. Smith had on and all.

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Garber: Oh, yes. That was later on, during the actual war when the men were all gone and we had six girls doing the Sentinel news. And I had the fire department as my beat. And I loved it. And I remember the first time I went down to the fire station and I was sitting down there talking to the fire chief and the alarm rang. And he came over and picked it up and said, "Excuse me, Miss Mary, but I've got to go to a fire." And then later on, they had a fire out in one of the poorer sections of town and I used to go—almost every time the fire engines rolled, I went, too, because I enjoyed going there and covering the fires.

This was at night and the fire chief saw me out there and he said, "Miss Mary, you ought not to be out here." So he took me by the hand, took me over to his car and put me in the car. And I sat in there with the heater going, it was nice and warm, and in about fifteen minutes he came over and told me everything that had gone on, how much the fire cost and who owned the house and how the fire started and everything about it.

Then another time there was a fire in town in the one of the stores and he asked me if I'd like to see where the fire started. It was down in the basement. And he took me by the hand and there were about three or four inches of water on the floor. And he showed me where the fire started but I ruined a good pair of shoes and got my clothes all smelly and fiery and it was just a mess.

Gentry: Give me a feeling of what it was like during World War II and how the newspaper situation changed for women.

Garber: It wasn't just the newspaper situation. When the war was on, every able-bodied man was in service. They used to have a song, "You're Either Too Young or Too Old." And that was pretty much true. The only men who were home were men who were in the service and were stationed around here. Or young boys or old men or people who had some sort of physical handicap. So women did everything. And as I say, we had six girls on the Sentinel staff and we covered every beat. We covered court, as I say, I covered the fire depart-ment, we covered just every beat there was. And it wasn't a question of anybody discriminating against women because women were doing everything then and there weren't any men there. And I think that was the beginning that showed people that women could do things.

Gentry: And that was also your first big break into sports.

Garber: It was the only way I would have ever gotten into sports. We had a high school boy who came in and put up the Sentinel sports page before he went to school in the morning. And then he graduated from high school and went into the Navy. And Nady Cates, who was our managing editor, asked me if I would like to do sports. And I guess I'm the only person who began as a sports editor and then wound up down at the bottom of the staff. But I was sports editor for a year and covered every sport that we had and got along just fine. And then the war ended and the men came home and I was back on the news side.

Gentry: Well, what kind of sports stories could you cover during the war? It wouldn't be professional, would it, because all the young men would be gone?

Garber: Well, one of the first stories I ever covered was—I took the job in November. And Winston-Salem State, which is a black school in town here, played a Thanksgiving morning football game. So Nady called me over and he said, "Now, I want you to go over and cover the Winston-Salem State football game and come back and write a story for the afternoon paper." And I had never done anything like that. So he showed me how to take a long piece of copy paper and put Winston-Salem State on it—and I can't even remember who they were playing but it was Winston-Salem State on one side and whoever they were playing on the other side. And then write down the play-by-play as each play was made.

So that looked like it was pretty easy and I thought I could do that. And I went over to the stadium and went into the press box and it was full of men. And they didn't have any programs and of course I didn't know who any of the players were. And I was just desperate; I didn't know what I was going to do. And there was a man sitting there and I think he saw my helpless expression. And he asked me what the problem

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to some coach or do something?" Carlton was working by himself, so he was real ready to get any help he could get.

After about a year, Nady called me in and he said, "Look, you're spending all your time over there helping Carlton, why don't you just go over there and stay? Then you'll be happy and I won't have you moaning around here with all the things that you don't want to do so you can get over and do sports which is what you like." I stayed in there ever since. That was in 1946 and I've been in it ever since.

Gentry: In the forties and fifties and even the sixties, weren't you and Carlton Byrd the sole staff of the Sentinel?

Garber: We were it. We were it.

Gentry: How did you manage to cover everything?

Garber: Well, of course, you've got to remember for one thing there weren't as many sports and the sports didn't overlap as much as they do now. But we worked it out. Carlton did most of the college work and I sort of did just about everything else. I was young and enthusiastic and willing to spend a lot of time in it. We got it all done.

Gentry: So you did a lot of high school work—well, it wasn't fancy, you didn't have press boxes and things like that so how would you, for instance, cover a high school football game back then?

Garber: Well, you'd cover the high school football game by—I used to have to carry a little clipboard and I'd run up and down the sidelines according to where the play was and when they'd snap the ball, I'd start running with the halfback or whoever was running with the ball. And run down to where the play was made, the tackle was made. Then it was easy to find out who was running with the ball because you could see who it was and you knew who made the tackle because you saw him get up. But just to help out, I would always get a couple of players who weren't playing, maybe they were reserves, maybe they were hurt, and they'd help me spot.

I remember one time I was covering a high school football game, the two teams got in a big fight. The two boys who were spotting for me ran out and got into the fight with the other players. Then they came back and one got on one side of me and one got on the other side of me. They went about two more plays and they got into another fight on the field and both boys left again and went out and got into the fight. I kept thinking, what am I going to do if they ever go after each other because they were both about three times as big as I was. But they never bothered me at all.

I remember one fall it rained every Friday night. And of course, you've got to realize in those days women did not wear pants. So I had a blue skirt that I wore and a pair of saddle shoes and socks. And I wore a sweat shirt. I would go out every Friday night with that on. When I got home on Friday night, they would be soaked and I would be wet and I'd just take them off and leave them on the back porch. At the end of the season, I just picked the whole bunch up and threw it in the trash because the shoes were ruined, the skirt was ruined, and the sweatshirt was ruined.

Gentry: Well, your high school beat in those days—everyone I've talked to has said you just handled it superbly. And I've seen stacks of letters from middle-aged men today, in the last few years, that remember your coverage of high school games of them and remember you very well. You must have really influenced their lives or made an impact on them. Can you tell me how that was?

Garber: I don't think it was anything particular that I did. You've got to remember that high school is a wonderful time in most people's lives. And for these kids, when they played on the football team or the basketball team or the baseball team or whatever team it was, they became "celebrities." I was able to write about them and it got into the newspaper and they had their pictures in the newspaper. And in a lot of ways,

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Gentry: I know often you went beyond the story, after the story, and stayed to give kids advice. Isn't that kind of unusual?

Garber: No, because this all came—there wasn't so much advice that I gave them but most of these conversations came after I had interviewed a boy. The only one that was different was a young man who was a high school student. And he used to keep the basketball scorebook. And usually at the half of the basketball game, everybody goes down and leaves the little place where we sit to cover the game, goes down and gets a coke and some popcorn to refresh themselves for the second half. But Jimmy stayed this time. So I knew that he wanted something. And finally he said, "Miss Garber, would you answer a question for me?" And I said, "I certainly will if I can." And he said, "How do you ask a girl for a date?"

Well, now, I can tell you how to sit at home and wait for some boy to call you but I'm not very good about asking a girl for a date because I'd never done anything like that. But I told Jimmy that it was very simple. I said, "You pick out the girl that you'd like to ask and just ask this girl if she'd like to go to the movie with you on Friday night or whatever you want to do." And he said, "But suppose she says no." And I said, "Well, I can't imagine her being so stupid as to do that but if she does, then you just go find another girl and ask her." So that seemed to satisfy him and he went downstairs and got his popcorn and coke.

And I lost track of him after he graduated from high school and I didn't see him until—oh, quite a few years ago. And I was shopping right before Christmas at the five-and-ten and Jimmy was there. And he was buying doll clothes. So I think Jimmy certainly asked somebody for a date and knew how to do it and had proper results.

And then there was a college student during the Vietnam war. I asked him what he was going to do after he got out of school and he said he was going to go into the Army and he knew he was going to be sent to Vietnam. And he said, "I'm concerned because I think I'm going to be a coward." And I knew he needed help and I knew he wanted me to tell him something that would be of aid to him but I didn't know what to say.

And so finally I said, "Well, heck, of course I've never been in combat and I don't know anything about it. But I would guess that it's very much like playing in a game." I said, "Aren't you always nervous before you go in a game?" And he said yes, he was. And I said, "Once you get into it, you forget everything about being nervous and you just do the job you're assigned to do." And I said, "I think that's the way combat's going to be." And he said, "Yeah, I guess so." I have never found out how he got along but I'm sure he did.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Gentry: Didn't you even have to sew up the pants of a basketball player one time?

Garber: Yes, I did, and that was a horrible experience. I went to the gym and John Frederick who was the coach of the Hanes High School basketball team was sitting there. And he had a pair of basketball pants that were just ripped. And I mean, they were torn from here to there. And he said, "Mary, would you sew these for me?" Well, I figured I was safe on that because surely nobody could find a needle and thread at a basketball gym. So I promised to do it. And he said, "Well, I've sent some of the boys out to get a needle and thread." So in about five minutes, these kids came back. They'd told a lady they were on a scavenger hunt. And she had given them a needle and thread.

So I sat down in the very dim light of a basketball gym and finally got the needle threaded and started sewing. And I assure you, I sewed to make them stick, I wasn't looking for pretty sewing. And I just got them started when an errant pass from the girls' basketball game hit me and knocked the pants one way and the needle and thread another way and they both went under the grandstand then. And the kids crawled under the grandstand in all that popcorn and chewing gum and everything else and found them both. And then Johnny sat on one side, the boys sat on the other, and knocked all the balls away that came over that way, until I got the

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gate to see if I was coming in. I didn't realize it. If I had realized at the time how important it was to them, I think it would have been frightening, I really do, to have it mean that much. But I've been paid a thousand-fold back from the citizens of the black community for whatever I did then.

Gentry: And you felt perfectly comfortable in a crowd of 2500 black people, didn't you?

Garber: I don't think I ever thought about being the only white person there. I have always felt that people are people. And there are nice black people and black people that aren't nice. And there are nice white people and white people that aren't nice. And I have never been able to understand this feeling that you take people and say all people on this side of the street are bad and all the people on this side of the street are good. I just don't understand that. And I think people who condemn groups, whether they're because of race or whether they're because of ethnic background or religion or anything, they're the losers because they miss knowing a lot of perfectly wonderful people and they close their minds to them and they're the ones that are hurt.

Gentry: I know a very close friend of yours and—it's Bighouse Gaines, the coach at Winston-Salem State. Tell me how that friendship developed and what you learned from him.

Garber: Bighouse, of course—I don't know how many of you people that are listening to this know about Bighouse Gaines. He's coached at Winston-Salem State since the forties. He's won more basketball games, he's a college basketball coach, he's won more basketball games than anyone who has ever lived at any level in college basketball, with the exception of Adolph Rupp. Just last year he went over eight hundred games won. He has 806 now as he starts into the 1990-91 season. And he is a true legend in himself.

We were talking the other day, trying to remember the first time we met. And we couldn't because I was unimportant to him, he was another college coach I met, I was another writer coming over there—we just didn't. But we have become very, very close friends over the years. So close, our families are friends and we introduce each other as brother and sister. I never had a brother but he's as close to a brother as any I've ever had.

Gentry: But of course he's black.

Garber: Yes, he is black. And we get some kind of strange looks sometimes. And I remember one time when integration just began, one of the black schools, it was Atkins, and North Forsyth which was the integrated school got in a big fight at one of the games. And so a committee was set up to work out the problems of integration. And I was over at Winston-Salem State one time right after that happened. And a couple of the black men were over there talking with Bighouse and they started to say something and then they turned around and looked at me. And Bighouse said, "Go ahead and say anything you want to. She's one of us."

And he's been a great friend of mine. Of course, he lived through segregation, he had to give up a lot of things because he was born black. I have sometimes wondered where he would have gone and what he would have done if he had been born twenty years later and had the same opportunities that men like John Thompson have had. But I found that he was a person that I could always go to to get good advice.

I remember one time I was having—one of the few times I had trouble with a coach. And he was a young black man. And I just couldn't get through to him. So I went to Bighouse and I said, "What am I doing wrong? What can I do to get along with this man?" And he said, "Just keep on doing what you're doing. He will come around." About a week later, I went over to see this man about something. And we were talking in his classroom. And after we'd finished with basketball, we just started talking. And I didn't realize how long we'd been there. And all of a sudden, I looked at my watch, it was six o'clock. Everybody in the whole school building had gone home and he and I were still sitting there talking. And he said, "I think we'd better get out of here." So we left. And ever after that—he went on to be a college coach—and ever since then he's been one of my very close friends and we've never had any more trouble after that. So Bighouse was right.

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I remember Nady told me after he retired that his colleagues would say to him, "Why do you want to have that woman on your staff? She ought not to be there." And he said, "I want her there, that's why." And I know Carlton had to take it. I'm sure he had to put up with a lot. But they were all very good to me and gave me the opportunity to do it. And so I tried to at least do my part by working hard at it and by not making any big deals out of things.

Gentry: You were denied admission to the major sportswriting organizations for many years, like the Southern Conference of Sportswriters, the ACC, the Football Writers—they wouldn't let you in because you're a woman. Isn't that right?

Garber: That's right. And that's one of the things that I think that young writers—young woman writers, particularly—need to be aware of. When I came back and talked to Leon Dure about the press box, he agreed to help me on that. And then I figured I'd gotten in that, so I said, "Well, they won't let me into Southern Conference Sportswriters, either." And he said, "That has nothing to do with you being a sportswriter." He said, "You can be a sportswriter without being in those organizations and those organizations have a right to put anybody in they want to and keep anybody out they want to." And he says, "I'm not going to help you with that."

And I thought that that was awful at the time because I really wanted to be in the Southern Conference Sportswriters Association almost as much as I wanted to sit in the press box. And I couldn't see the difference. But I do now. And the Southern Conference Sportswriters—we dropped out of membership and then when the Atlantic Coast Conference was formed in 1954. And the Atlantic Coast Conference sportswriters had the rule that the Southern Conference Sportswriters had. I still just could not be a member.

But our company used to pay all our dues. And we had a new sports editor come in; he didn't realize that I couldn't belong. So when he sent the dues in for the other writers, he sent mine in, too. And the treasurer obviously didn't know, either. And he accepted—I think it was five bucks then. He accepted my five bucks. And then there was a real problem because they had accepted me into membership as soon as they took my dues.

So they had a big board meeting. And I think it was kind of like, you know when a boys' gang runs around and little sister goes along with them. And they try to send her home and she won't get discouraged and finally they decided, well, let's put her out in the outfield and let her play the outfield and don't send her home and just accept her. And they did accept me. After I got in, they really did take me in as one of the group and I have a fine time in the organization.

And I remember one year when they announced the slate for membership, Bob Quincy from the Charlotte News was announcing it. And he went through the secretary and the treasurer and the vice president and the board of directors and everybody else. And finally he said, "We've got our nomination for president, our biggest jock of all, Mary Garber," and everybody got up and clapped. And it was quite a sensation because no woman had ever been head of a male writing organization.

And the Football Writers Association was the organization that kept me from being in the press box in those early days. And eventually I got into that. And I served two terms on the board of directors of that organization. And the Atlantic Coast Sportswriters have set up an award for the outstanding Atlantic Coast Conference woman athlete of the year and it's named after me and I consider that a very great honor.

Gentry: Well, you had to endure a lot of petty prejudice through the years but you won the big ones. What are some of the petty prejudices you had to endure?

Garber: Well, it wasn't so much—I think the prejudices that bothered me the most were the ones after I'd gotten established, when I figured everything was all over and you didn't have to worry about it and then you'd run into something that was just prejudice. I remember one time I went down to the Charlotte Coliseum to

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And he did. And once he started it, all the other coaches did it, too. And so that solved one big problem.

But I remember one time, Wake Forest and Carolina got in a big fight at a basketball game. And there was no way that Bones could come out because there was just a mess around the dressing room. So I figured, "Okay. This is one time he's done the best he can, I'll just have to work around it." And I was standing outside and he stuck his head out the door and he said, "Mary, if you'll just give me a minute, I'll take care of the situation." So the Wake Forest dressing room was divided into two sides and the boys dressed on one side and there was a conference room on the other. But sometimes the guys came to the other side when they were not dressed. So Bones called, "Mary's coming in here. Don't come on this side and watch your language." So we went in there and had the interview. And I'll never forget the look on some of the people's faces when I walked out.

And then there was a man who worked on the football dressing room door at North Carolina State named John Baker. He was a police officer. I was down there with him one time and he wanted to know who I was and what I was doing and I told him. And he said, "Little lady, you do have a problem, don't you, 'cause you can't get into the dressing room?" And I told him, "Sure, I do." And he said, "Well, let me tell you what I'm going to do for you." He said, "You come down here every game right before the game's over and I'll slip you into the coaches' room and you can sit in there and I'll bring the players in to you."

So I would go down right before the game was over, he and I would stand by the fieldhouse and as soon as the game was over, we'd both run to the dressing room and he unlocked the door and let me into the coaches' room before the players got in there. And it was right next to the dressing room so you could hear what the coaches said to the players, you could hear the players talking, you could hear them singing their school song, and it was a great thing to get atmosphere. And then the coaches would come in there and have their conference so I could be in there for that. And then Mr. Baker would come and he'd say, "All right, Miss Mary, who do you want?" And I'd tell him what players I wanted. And I guaranteed they did not get out the door.

And one time I was waiting and he came in, he said, "Has everybody been in here?" And I said, "Everybody but Dave Buckey." And he scowled and about two minutes later the door flung open and Dave Buckey—I mean, he was shoved into the room, I don't mean he came. And he was just barely trying to get dressed and he'd had a big game and he just hadn't had a chance to get back in. But Mr. Baker wasn't going to let him get out.

Most of the time I would tell the sports information director what players I wanted and they would ask the players to come out and talk to me when they finish showering and dressing. But the trouble was that meant I had to wait forty-five minutes or an hour until the players finished talking to the male writers. And I remember one time, Virginia Tech beat Duke and a young player named Todd Greenwood threw the winning touchdown pass. So I went down to the Virginia Tech dressing room and I asked one of the assistant coaches to tell Todd I wanted to talk to him. About two minutes later he came out and he was just laughing. And he said, "Todd says please don't leave. He said he used to be a junior tennis player and he always wanted you to talk to him and you never did. And he said now he's got a chance to talk to you and he said please don't leave, he'll be out just as fast as he can get out." And that was very interesting.

And another time at Duke, Mike McGee used to hold his press conference in a room—it was a vacant room, it was a weight room, behind the locker room. And the sports information director said, "Mary, there's no reason you can't be in there." He said, "You can go in before the players get undressed." And he said, "Then I'll show you a way to go out through the physical education department and you won't have to come back through the locker room."

So that worked fine for about two weeks and then one week when I went in there, I started out through the physical education department and there was a man in there taking a shower. He nearly died and I did, too. I backed out in a hurry and we negotiated through the door. And it seems that—I told him what I was trying

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And of course, the invariable question that comes up with this situation is "Well, if women can go into the men's locker room, then can men go into the women's locker room?" The answer of course is yes. But the difference is that women's locker rooms are generally closed to both men and women. So it's not a problem. And during the NCAA basketball tournament—women's basketball tournament—men go into the women's locker room just like women go into the men's locker room. Only the difference is that the women have enough sense to stay dressed until the men get out of there. So many people have tried to make this an emotional issue or a moral issue and it's not either one. It's a legal issue.

Gentry: Do you think young women sportswriters in the 1990s are going to even face more difficulties on this issue than you did years back, decades back?

Garber: Oh, yes, I think that the position of young women sportswriters today is far more difficult than mine was and that's for several reasons. One is I think that there's much more opposition to women sportswriters—there are so many more women sportswriters that all of a sudden people begin to realize, hey, women sportswriters are here to stay. When I came in, I was the only one and people sort of accommodated themselves to me and I accommodated myself to them. But it's much more difficult.

And I think one of the problems with the young women sportswriters today is that you never really know what the rules are. I knew what the rules were. When I went to a game, I knew I couldn't go into the dressing room, there wasn't any question about it. I remember a friend of mine who covered the New York Islanders for the New York Daily News. And she said the difficulty was that you never knew, one game you'd go and everything was okay, you could go into the dressing room and there was no problem. The next day you'd go and they'd say, "No, you can't go in." And it made it extremely difficult because you couldn't plan ahead. I knew when I went to cover a game that I couldn't go into the dressing room. So I made arrangements, I was all set up, I was all prepared to take care of the situation. But it must be extremely difficult to go to three games and not have any problems at all of access and then all of a sudden be told no.

And one of the big problems that young women face today is for some reason which I do not understand, the male sportswriters blame the women for all the problems. When a school closes the locker room to keep from admitting women, instead of saying "Hey, these people are trying to keep me from doing my job," they say, "Well, it's all Diane's fault because she wanted to go into the dressing room." It's not Diane's fault, it's not Lisa's fault, it's not my fault. All we're doing is trying to do our job and I can't understand why the men don't realize this and why they aren't as willing to fight for our rights as they are for their own rights. But that isn't the way it works and they don't seem to realize that if I lose my rights, then they're going to lose theirs, too.

Gentry: Do you think there's a way that they can remedy this situation so there's truly equal access?

Garber: I see no reason why women can't go into the dressing room. You know, somebody went to a great deal of trouble to invent two things—one is a towel and the other is a bathrobe. And all you've got to do is take the towel and put it around your waist or take the bathrobe and put it on. There's no law that says you have to walk around without any clothes on. Just last year, when Bighouse Gaines was going for his eight hundredth win over at the Coliseum. And even though I was retired and I was no longer covering games, I wanted to be there because I knew Bighouse and I wanted to be there when he won his 800th game.

Well, he lost. And I wanted to tell him that okay, we'll try again. And I had been told that under our new Coliseum there was an interview room apart from the actual locker room. So I went in to the Winston-Salem State locker room and found out that that isn't quite true, that even though they are separate, there's nothing between them. So I started to leave because there was no reason really for me to be there. And Buddy Taylor who's the trainer at Winston-Salem State said, "Wait just a minute." And he spoke to the boys and they put towels around themselves and went on and went in to take the shower. And there was no problem. There was no problem because they were considerate and they were gentlemen. And I just don't see why it can't be done.

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Garber: Oh, it's an entirely different operation now. When I first began covering sports, we sent our stories by Western Union. We would write them on a typewriter and then we would hand them to a whole row of ladies, Western Union ladies who sat on the back row in the press box. And you'd take your copy back to them and they would send it to your paper by Western Union. And they were a very present help in time of trouble because when you made a mistake, they would come down and say, "You didn't really mean to say this," and that was a big help.

Then we went to telecopiers and they were big machines about that size. And I had little roll of them and you typed your story and put it on the little roll and sent it back by telephone to them, on the telecopier. And those things weighed a ton—they must have weighed fifteen, sixteen pounds. Then we went to computers and at first they were pretty heavy but now they've got them down to they don't weigh more than about six or seven pounds, they're real easy, you can just sling them over your shoulder, almost like a pocketbook. But they get temperamental sometimes. And I remember one time when I was down at Duke, they shot off fireworks after the game. And it didn't bother anybody's computer but mine. But mine just went berserk. I had to wind up dictating my story.

Gentry: Well, you were mentioned how Mal Mallette helped you with the dry run. He also helped you perfect your writing, didn't he?

Garber: Yes, he did. When he came in, he was very critical and most of us didn't like him at first. And when you came to work in the morning, you would find a whole bunch of notes on the—this was wrong, that was wrong, this was wrong, that was wrong. And it got to the point that we just laughed about it. But he used to sit down with me every day and go over the stories I'd written and show me what I'd done well, what I had not done well. And he was more critical than giving me praise. And after a while, it just kind of got to me.

And so one day when he was criticizing me, I said, "Mal, I don't think there's anything I can do to please you." And he looked at me and said, "Don't you know why I'm doing this?" And I said, "No." And I guess I was kind of like a sulky child. And he said, "I'm doing this because I think you can be really good." And after that, I would have done anything in the world for him because I knew he believed in me and he really wanted to help me. And he was one of the biggest helps that anybody's ever been for me.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Gentry: So you always had tremendous support from the people on the paper but in return, you've paid them back in your commitment to them. You once told me you worked twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, and I believe that, watching you in action. Do you think that kind of commitment is necessary to be a good sportswriter?

Garber: Not entirely. Not really that much. But I think that you've got to realize that sportswriting or newspaper work of any kind is really a twenty-four hour a day, 365 days a year, because you never know when news is going to break, you never know when the story is going to happen. And whenever it does, you have to be ready to go. I can't tell you how many times when I was working full time and even sometimes after I officially retired, I'd get a call at home at night that something had happened and they needed me back at the office. And you have to be ready to go.

And of course, in sports you've got to be working every weekend. I remember we had a young man who wanted to work in sports. And he worked about two weekends and then he asked the boss, "When do I get a weekend off? I can't work every weekend." Well, if you're going to work in sports, you're going to work every weekend. And it makes a—you have to be willing to give up a lot of things, you really do.

Gentry: And that's where your sister Neely, who has lived with you all these years, really helped you in taking care of your elderly parents and when you were gone half the night and gone every weekend—

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But whatever you do, any time you write or any job you take, I would certainly ask the editor or whoever is in charge of your department to criticize your work. Tell them that you have no objection to them cutting anything out or leaving anything out but be sure to have them tell you why because that's the only way you're going to learn.

When you do get a job, I think you need to pay your dues. When women first came into sportswriting, all too many of them wanted to be feature writers and start right off writing a column and doing feature work. That's the cream of the crop, you don't start doing that. I think it's a good idea to start with high school sports because it allows you the opportunity to do a variety of things. You can cover games, you can write features, you might even have a column.

I think it's important to learn to cover nonrevenue sports. I don't like to say minor sports because there's no such thing as a minor sport to the people who play them. And the more different things that you can do—if you can cover a whole lot of different sports and be reasonably knowledgeable in them, you have a whole lot better chance to have a job on a newspaper. And if you like makeup work and if you like to lay out pages and read copy and do things like that, you can always have a job because desk men are very, very hard to get. And I think that you are to be sure that you don't let yourself get into a rut, that you never stop learning, you have got to be willing to try something new and try some different way of writing, change the way you're doing things.

Another thing is to don't be a clubhouse lawyer. There's always somebody on the staff who's going to be griping and complaining. If you've got a problem, go to whoever you've got the problem with and talk it out but don't be a whiner. And don't be a clockwatcher. Your job comes first. And you can't be one of these people who says, "Well, I can't cover that game because that's the weekend I'm going to the beach." Forget it. You've got to be willing to pitch in.

If you're a woman, don't look for discrimination. There was a young man who played at Wake Forest, he was one of the first blacks who played there. And one of the things he told me—we were talking about the job of being a black in an all-white school and having discrimination. He said, "Don't ever look for it." He said, "You will find enough discrimination that is really there without seeing discrimination when it isn't intended." And I think that's very important for women because you are going to run into problems and you are going to run into things that may seem to be discriminatory and may seem to be unfair but try to roll with the punches, try to work around them.

And a big help on that is a sense of humor. When those guys in the office get on you and they're giving you a bad time, a little sense of humor, a quick quip or letting them know—just like when your big brother used to tease you. He'll stop teasing you when he realizes he's not going to get a rise out of you and he's not bothering you.

And of course, the thing to be professional. Accuracy is important. Fairness is important. To present the story—the thing is to present the story as fully and completely and fairly as you can. And your most important asset is your integrity. If you don't have that, you don't have anything. And if you do make a mistake, if you do mess up somewhere, be big enough to admit it. Everybody makes mistakes and it will help you a whole lot if you'll say, "Hey, sure, I just blew that," but just don't do it again.

Gentry: How have the relationships of coaches and players and the media changed?

Garber: Oh, it's changed tremendously. When I first began covering college sports back in forties and fifties, I was close friends with the coaches at the various schools. If I wanted to talk to a coach, say, at Wake Forest, I'd just go out there and knock on his door and if he was busy at the time, he'd say, "Go mess around for a few minutes, come back and we can talk." I had their home telephones, they had mine. I visited in their homes, they visited in mine. I knew their wives and children. We were close friends. I never hesitated to call them

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to go through the sports information office, you can't talk to a player until you do all that. And it's just taken a great deal away from it. I don't like it nearly as much. And I can't believe that the coaches do. And I can't believe that the players do. I think it was a much, much better set-up in the old days when we all knew each other and we were frank and honest with each other.

It was not at all unusual for me to go into—I remember one time I went into the Wake Forest basketball office and Billy Packer was an assistant coach. And I had hardly set foot in the door before Billy Packer said, "That was the dumbest story I have ever read in my whole life. I don't know why in the world you wrote such a stupid story yesterday." So we sat down and we went over what had upset him and I told him why I had done it the way I did. And we got the whole matter straightened out right there. But that doesn't happen now. Now, if I write something that the coach doesn't like, then the sports information director calls up. And the sports information director says, "Coach so-and-so was real upset with what you wrote." And my reaction is, "Well, who cares? I don't care whether Coach so-and-so is upset or not." And it's just not anywhere near as good for writers or coaches—or often for the readers, either one.

Gentry: You've lost a lot of intimacy.

Garber: We have. We have. We've lost a lot.

Gentry: Well, another major impact on your business must be television and the way it covers sports. How has that changed your coverage?

Garber: Television has really just revolutionized what we do as sportswriters. And it's made my job a whole lot harder, it really has, because when I first started covering games and I wrote my story for the paper, you as a reader, probably when you read my story, that was the first thing you had known anything about the game at all. You might have known who won or maybe once in a while you might have listened to a radio broadcast. But for the most part, you got all your information about the game from my story.

But now all that's changed. Now by the time I come home from covering, say, a Wake Forest game or Duke-Carolina game or whatever, you've seen it on television, you have seen experts interviewing the players, you have seen experts analyzing why the coaches made the moves they did, why the offenses and the defenses did what they did. And really, it's extremely difficult for us to come up something that is different. And also we have to be extremely careful because if I say Joe Blow caught the pass and made the tackle and you saw it on television and know perfectly well he did not, then ring-a-ring-a-ding goes my phone on Monday morning and you're telling me, "Hey, stupid, what game were you at?" It has made it very, very difficult and you have to be much more innovative. And you have to work a whole lot harder because of television.

Gentry: Well, in your long career you've been able to interview and write about a lot of famous sports legends. And the way you tell the stories, you tell things about them that most people never even see. I'd like to talk about a few of them. One is Jesse Owens. When did you meet Jesse Owens?

Garber: Jesse Owens, I had met him very, very briefly when he was at one of the Durham track meets. But that was in the mob situation where I was one of about fifty or sixty writers so of course he didn't have any idea who I was and I didn't have any direct contact with him. But CBS came down here to do a special on me for their CBS Morning News. And what they wanted to do was to follow me around for about three days. And so they asked me what I was going to be doing. And I told them that I was going to interview a Wake Forest basketball player and I was going to the Wake Forest-Carolina basketball game and the various things that I was doing.

And they seemed to be very unhappy with that. And they said, "Well, aren't you going to talk to anybody famous?" Well, there weren't that many famous people around here if their definition of famous does not include Wake Forest and college basketball players. But then I found out that Jesse Owens was coming here to make a talk at Wake Forest. So I said, "Well, Jesse Owens is coming here." Oh, they brightened right

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think about Brian, I can think of one bad thing about him. He absolutely hated to practice. And he was the worst goof-off and the worst get-out-of-everything when it came to practice because Bill Tate who coached football at Wake Forest used to give red helmets to everybody who worked hard in practice. And Brian in four years never came close to getting a red helmet. But he was a great guy.

And I remember his senior year he won the Arnold Palmer award which was the highest athletic award for Wake Forest. And for some reason, the guy who covered it for the morning paper left the Arnold Palmer award out when he listed all the other awards. Well, of course, Bill Tate was about to have a stroke. And he called up and he was very unhappy. And I don't know why I was picked, I just think they should have sent the guy that left it out but they sent me out to talk to Brian and try to make up for the mistake that we had made.

And Brian was just as nice as he could be. He just considered it a fender-bender in the history of the world, I don't know. But he was very cooperative and very nice. And it didn't make any difference. Joy, his wife, was very upset about it. But we wrote the story.

And then even though Brian was leading the country in scoring and yardage, he wasn't drafted when the NFL made their draft. And it hurt his pride. He tried very hard not to let anybody know that it hurt him, but it did hurt him. And the Chicago Bears signed him as a free agent. And then when he got to the Chicago Bears, there was Gale Sayers, so Brian still didn't get to play. He used to come home in the summer and we'd sit up in his apartment and try to make up Chicago Bear lineups that would get Brian to be a starter. And eventually he did. And I remember I called him after he started the first game and I said, "How you doing?" He said, "I've never hurt so much in my whole life but I've never been happier." And of course, very shortly after he achieved his great success, he developed cancer and he died. But he really was a perfectly wonderful young man.

Gentry: You got very close to Frank Howard, too, didn't you?

Garber: Yes. Yes. Frank's a phony. Frank pretends he's a big, tough, mean guy but he's not. He's one of the nicest people I know. Right after I started covering college sports, Clemson came here and I was sent out to Bowman-Gray Stadium to talk to Frank and to do a story on the game, pre-game story. And I told him who I was and what I was there for. And I expected him to hand me my head but instead of that, he called the whole Clemson team together, had them gather around, and he said, "This is Mary Garber and she's my friend and she's here to cover the game and all of you guys be good to her when she talks to you." You know, he didn't have to do that but it was a very, very great help to me.

And then later on, after I got to know him pretty well, he was having a football clinic down at Clemson and that was right after integration came in. And Dave Lash, who was a very close friend of mine, one of the black coaches here, wanted to go to the clinic but he didn't want to go if there was going to be any unpleasantness or anybody was going to make him unwelcome. So I wrote Frank and explained the situation to him and told him who Dave was and I said that, "He doesn't want to come if there's going to be any problem." So Frank wrote back, "Tell him to come."

So I told Dave and he went down there and he said he'd hardly checked into his motel room and bang! bang! bang! on the door. And it was Frank Howard. And he said, "I just checked in to see if you were okay and if everything was all right and if you need anything, you let me know because I'm going to be around here." And you know, he didn't have to do that, either. But it was a very kind thing.

And then one of my first trips to Clemson, he asked me if I had been there before and I said no. So he drove me all around Clemson and showed me the whole university. And I've never had anybody speak with so much love and affection for an institution as he did about Clemson. And as we started back to the motel, he said, "Where are you staying?" And I thought that was kind of dumb question since he'd picked me up at the motel and he knew perfectly well where I was. And I told him. And he said, "Oh, that's a bad place for rattlesnakes." He said, "You don't have any snake bite medicine with you, do you," meaning, of course,

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he was always telling the players, "You've got to be mentally tough. You can't let little things, injuries and that, get you down." And one time he sprained his ankle and she said he limped around the house and griped and complained. Finally she said to him, "Vince, you've got to be mentally tough. You can't let a little thing like a sprained ankle get you down." And I said, "What did he do?" And she said, "He didn't speak to me for a week!"

Gentry: Now, you knew Lefty Driesell a long, long time ago, when he first began, didn't you?

Garber: I knew Lefty when he started working at Davidson and I was covering Davidson then. I used to go down and talk to him and I remember one time we'd had an interview and he said, "Come on, let's go to lunch." So we went to one of the campus restaurants. And he said, "What would you like to have?" And I didn't know exactly what I should order. And he said, "Why don't you have a steak?" Now, don't ever offer me a steak unless you mean for me to take it because I'm going to take it. So I said, "Okay, I'll have a steak." And then he took a hamburger. And I said, "Why aren't you taking a steak?" And he said, "Well, I had a late breakfast and I'm not very hungry." So I ate the steak and enjoyed it. And then I found out afterwards that I'd eaten up his whole recruiting budget for the next month.

But Lefty was a person who really was his own worst enemy because he'd try to put on the worst connotation of himself. I remember one time and a friend of his were at the beach and they were walking along and they saw a place on fire. And Lefty went into the house and got the people out and really saved their lives. And when I said something to him about it, he said, "That wasn't anything. If they had known it was Lefty Driesell coming in, they'd have probably called the cops. But he really—you know, he really took a risk of his life to do that.

And another time at Duke he started off with a man-to-man defense and then went to a zone in the second half—and lost. And I said, "Lefty, why did you change?" And he said, "Because I'm a dumb coach." Well, he's not a dumb coach. He's a very, very talented coach. And I don't know—but he's one of my favorite people.

Gentry: What about Coach John Wooden?

Garber: I met Coach Wooden down at Campbell College basketball camp. And they used to have very many famous coaches down there. And they had so many and so many people wanted to come down and talk to them that they had Press Day. And they set up a routine where the writers had fifteen minutes with each coach and then the coach went on. And after Coach Wooden had finished his interview with my group, I had some questions I wanted to ask him. And so I went up to him and I said, "Could I talk with you some more?" And he said, "I've got to go on to my next interview but we can get together at lunch." And I figured, well, he's not going to follow through on that. But I was walking over to the cafeteria for lunch when he called to me. And he said, "I'm just getting back to you. Now we'll sit together at lunch and talk." And I said, "Coach, you can't sit with me. You've got to be at the head table." And he said, "I'm not going to sit at the head table, I told you that we'd talk at lunch and we're going to talk at lunch." So we sat down at the foot of the table and we talked basketball all during lunch and he was just as nice as he could be.

And then I saw him again when North Carolina State beat UCLA in the semi-finals of the NCAA tournament in Greensboro. And of course it was a tremendously disappointing loss for Coach Wooden. And of course it was very exciting for everybody in North Carolina to have North Carolina State on a brink—and they did that year win the national championship. And so in the press interview after the game, we just talked and talked and talked with Norm Sloan, the State coach. And Coach Wooden sat outside the interview room and he must have waited for forty-five minutes to an hour without getting upset or without getting angry or anything at all. And then he came in and answered our questions.

And the next morning at 7:30 they had a Fellowship of Christian Athletes breakfast. And we were all in there when Coach Wooden came in. And when he walked in the door, there must have been