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WINSTON-SALEM (AP) — Mary Garber, among the nation's first female sportswriters and the first woman to win the Red Smith Award, the Associated Press Sports Editors' highest honor, died Sunday. She was 92.

Rose Rush, a longtime friend whose father was an editor at the Winston-Salem Journal and Twin City Sentinel where Garber worked for 51 years, said Garber died around 12:50 p.m.

The Winston-Salem Journal reported Sunday that a minister was making the rounds at the Brookridge Retirement Village where Garber was a resident, and he asked what she had in mind for a spiritual reward in heaven.

"Football season," she said.

Garber was a sportswriter for the Journal and the Sentinel from 1946 through 1997. She started as a society writer during World War II, and moved when the all-male sports department of the Sentinel was depleted.

"Not because I had any ability in sports," Garber once told the Women's Sports Foundation, "but because it was the war, and every man was in the armed forces."

Even though she was banned from locker rooms and forced to sit with the players' wives instead of in the press box, Garber lobbied to continue covering sports after World War II ended.

Garber first gained access to a locker room at the 1974 Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tournament, 30 years after her sportswriting career began. She retired from the Winston-Salem Journal in 1986 but continued to work there part-time until 2002.

Garber served as president of the Football Writers Association of America and the Atlantic Coast Sports Writers Association, groups that initially denied her entry. Also in 2005, she became the first woman to win the Red Smith Award, the Associated Press Sports Editors' highest honor, given to someone who has made major contributions to sports journalism.

In 2006, the Association of Women in Sports Media named its annual award for Garber.

Also, Garber has been named to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and, most recently, the National Sportscasters and Sportwriters Hall of Fame, located in nearby Salisbury.

Garber is survived by one niece and three nephews. Funeral arrangements were pending Sunday night.