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WINSTON-SALEM - I've never written about her before because I figured it would just make her mad, but this time I have to.

Mary Garber was inducted Monday into the hall of fame of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. At the age of 92, she was once again pioneering a path into a world populated by men, not all of them her peers.

She was my friend and a mentor to me when I first walked off the campus of UNCG and into the newsroom at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's strange that all these years later, I feel I should tell young people the truth about our business, and the truth is if you have an option you might want to think of some other line of work.

Mary took me aside one day and basically did just that. It was 1980, I think, and I'd been coming into the newsroom for a few months taking phone calls and sort of trying out newspapers as a potential career path.

"Hey, boy," she said.

We were in the old library downstairs, the morgue we called it, and she'd crawled atop one of those thick, black tables we had throughout the old Journal-Sentinel building. Mary was a small girl, about 64 at the time. I was all of 23 and in awe of her.

"You sure you want to do this?" she asked.

Miss Mary had a way of getting right to the point. More than one Wake Forest coach had come to the newspaper through the years to try and get someone to convince her to stay out of their office, in some cases the very mail on their desks. She was a bulldog, a woman who'd become the sports editor of the Twin-City Sentinel before she'd ever even covered a sporting event.

The story is oft-told. The men were all away fighting the war, the big one, and Mary was one of many women who helped get the news out every day. Born in New York City and raised on the tough streets of Buena Vista in Winston, she'd become the society editor of the afternoon paper and probably assumed she'd found her calling. But like most of us in newspapers, our calling finds us. Mary became sports editor because there was no one else to do it.

Her first event was a Winston-Salem State football game on Thanksgiving Day, and of course that story would be one of the most important ever written in Winston-Salem. To this day, there are people who will tell you she changed the city as no other person ever could. A few years back, someone at the Washington Press Club convinced her to sit down for several hours and give an oral history of her career. One of many poignant entries was this one:

"The greatest compliment I ever received I really didn't hear first-hand," she said. "I got it second-hand from Mamie Braddy, who is a friend of mine. And I was covering the soap-box derby out at Bowman Gray Stadium. I was down on the field talking to some of the kids. And Mamie was up in the stands. And there were two little black boys; she said they looked like they were about 10 or 11 years old. And they were up in the stands. And one of them said to the other, 'Do you see that lady down on the field there?' And the other kid said, 'Yeah.' And the first kid said, 'That's Miss Mary Garber. And she don't care who you are, if you do something, she'll write about you.' And to me that's the greatest compliment that anyone could possibly make for me."

She went to my high school, dear old Winston-Salem High (now Reynolds) and she covered events I was at when I was just a kid, and I remember pointing out the little lady in the toboggan and the Reynolds letter jacket (like me, she was a Reynolds homer) and I would tell my friends, "See that lady? That's Mary Garber. That's what I want to do when I grow up." They'd laugh at me, not because I wanted to be a sportswriter but because I was talking about emulating a woman.

Ironically, in 1984, I was hired by the Journal's features department and became the first male features writer to ever work in what had been the Women's Page since, well, forever. I'd kid Mary about being a pioneer, too. She'd roll her eyes.

"Boy," she said, her little legs curled up under her chin there on that table in the library.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"Save your money," she told me. "And don't believe anything anybody tells you."

She's in a nursing home now, and as frail as any 92-year-old. She still reads the paper every day. She's been inducted into every hall of fame you can think of and finally, after all these years, given the due she never received opening doors and waiting outside closed locker room doors for the athletes to come out and talk to her. Some never did.

Some were dragged out by Big House Gaines and forced to talk to her.

Others went out of their way to talk to Miss Mary.

She was once told by a local high school coach that she was welcome to come to his practice any time she felt like it. This was back in the days when football coaches were even more paranoid than they are now, days when they ruled with an unquestioned authority, the very embodiment of manhood.

"The kids behave themselves so much better when you're here," he said.

Miss Mary was inducted into another hall of fame Monday night, and I felt once again that maybe I'd made the right career choice after all.

But only after I'd talked it over with her.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com