Cheryl Miller, Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm can thank Mary Gerber who broke, with difficulty, the gender barriers for women sportswriters, and later, sportscasters.
Gerber died Sunday in Winston-Salem at age 92, reports The New York Times.
She covered high school and then the ACC before branching out to a wide variety of sports for Winston-Salem papers. And, as the Times reports, she covered black athletics during the segregationist era in the South.
The Times includes a humorous anecdote about the camaraderie between Gerber and a black sportswriter:
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.”
