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WINSTON-SALEM — A rose for Miss Mary.

A matriarch of a dying business died Sunday in the city she helped build. Mary Garber, newspaper woman and social pioneer, passed away at the age of 92. She left behind nieces and nephews and a life's work, using her influence as one of the county's first and only female sportswriters to help Winston-Salem through times of racial unrest, wars and social upheaval.

Sportswriters used to do that sort of thing.

She became a confidante of people like Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, whom she called Earl to her dying days, refusing to see him or anyone else near the end. Monroe called her "Miss Mary." He was the one of the greatest college basketball players of his day, and she was one of the greatest gals.

Garber learned the job on the run, taking the role of sports editor of the old Twin-City Sentinel during World War II after a short stint as society editor. She was an overnight sensation. Headlines appeared as early as 1949 as scribes and magazine writers discovered her in dugouts and outside locker rooms, a novelty, a curiosity, a trail blazer.

"State's Only Gal Sportswriter," a headline blared in '49.

Garber worked at the Winston-Salem Journal until she retired, and then she worked some more. She covered track and field and basketball and football and high school sports for several generations of athletes in Winston, writing about the Soap Box Derby and the next great tennis champion before her dog ate her hearing aid and she finally convinced herself to slow down some.

She was inducted into the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 and into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association earlier this year.

One day, late in the previous century, back after she'd supposedly retired, a handyman came to her house. Mary's sister, Neely, answered the door because, well, Mary was at work.

"Is this where Mary Garber lives?" the man asked.

Neely was the devoted younger sister, and the two lived together until Neely's death several years ago. They were quite a pair. Neely marveled at the influence her big sister seemed to have. "Yes," she said quickly. She had Mary's wry sense of humor. The man pulled a yellowed article out of his wallet, one written by Mary Garber years and years before. It was about a marble tournament he'd won when he was 10.

"Lord," she said.

Garber was at the Journal through the entire modern history of the city, and men like legendary Winston-Salem State University basketball coach Clarence "Big House" Gaines credited her with helping Winston through tough times, recognizing black athletes long before anyone would even consider it.

Gaines, who retired as the winningest basketball coach of all time, often escorted her from the locker room door to the parking lot outside, sometimes taking her calls in the middle of the night, sometimes calling her for favors during the tempestuous times in the late 1960s.

When she was turned away from the Duke press box for a football game in those same days, the publisher of the Journal called the university and said "If you turn away Mary Garber, you turn away the Winston-Salem Journal." Other papers followed the lead, and a long-held practice of an old boys network ended.

It was also at Duke, years later, when a brash young college athlete named Gene Banks walked into Cameron Indoor Stadium for his final game as a senior basketball player. Dressed in a tux and flanked by two women carrying roses, he saw an old woman dressed in men's clothes, her white hair tucked up under a toboggan.

Banks, who now lives in Greensboro, stopped and took a stem from one of the girls.

"A rose for Miss Mary," he said.

He handed a long-stem rose to Mary Garber of the Winston-Salem Journal and Twin-City Sentinel, sportswriter and social pioneer, one of the first women to cover sports in America.

She didn't blush.

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