More on "Miss Mary."

Three from the Winston-Salem Journal: Everybody has a 'Mary story', The Best of Friends: Mary Garber, Krzyzewski, Knight formed an unusual friendship. Mary Garber stood very tall in a man's world.

The newspaper roster generously listed Mary Garber as 5 feet tall, yet she was the tallest person in almost every room.Mary, who died yesterday at 92, towered over human prejudice and human smallness.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Clarence "Big House" Gaines, who coached basketball for 47 years at Winston Salem State University before being named to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, met Garber soon after he was hired as coach in 1946 and eventually they became friends.

"Nobody cared much about black players 40 years ago," Gaines told Sports Illustrated in 2000, five years before he died. "But Miss Mary covered a lot of things that weren't too popular. She went out of her way to see that everybody got a fair shake."

From the Washington Post (scroll past the Ryder Cup stuff)

It would not be right for me or anyone else in the sportswriting business to not pause for a moment to pay tribute to Mary Garber, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92.

To call Mary a pioneer is an understatement. She began writing for the sports pages of The Winston-Salem Journal during World War II because, as she would tell people later, there weren't enough men around to cover everything. She continued to write sports for the Journal until 2002. For years, she wasn't even allowed to sit in the press box while covering games -- she sat in the stands, often with the wives or relatives of the athletes she was covering. She never complained about anything, just did her job, wrote wonderfully and helped out countless young reporters, male and female, along the way.

And from the News-Record Hardin: Garber's influence touched all of us, and from the New York Times:

As Ms. Garber gained acceptance, she looked at her pioneering with some amusement. She told Ms. Gentry about the times when black sportswriters began to be hired. She was working at “one of the games that one of the first black writers came to — he was from the Durham paper — and he and I sat next to each other.”

“And I was feeling pretty sure of myself by that time,” she added. “So when he came in and sat down, I reached over and poked him and I said, ‘Welcome, fellow minority.’ And he laughed.”