A trio who made us different

The Passing Scene
As the year rushes on and the seasons change, it's time to take note of just a few of the remarkable North Carolinians who've died recently:
John Webb of Wilson, who died at age 82 on Sept. 18. He was a judge for 27 years, serving on the Superior Court bench from 1971-77, then on the N.C. Court of Appeals until 1986, and on the Supreme Court until 1998.He was a World War II veteran, one of millions who went off to war, came back to go to college and law school and went on to build successful careers and become pillars of the community. They'll tell stories for a long time about John Webb, once known as the Smiling Cobra because he was soft-spoken and could smile and listen politely to defendants and their lawyers -- then strike with a tough sentence for those offenders who needed to go to prison.

Nell Joslin Styron of Raleigh died at age 93 on Sept. 10. There was just no one quite like her. She was a newspaper writer, poet, gardening expert, restaurant hostess and generally the life of the Capital City. I met her one day in the 1970s when journalist Ferrel Guillory introduced me to an out-of-the-way restaurant called The Upstairs (and known to old-timers as Marcus's, after a delicatessen that preceded The Upstairs. Nell Styron personally escorted diners to their tables, described the day's specials and regularly advised customers not to miss the cherry dessert -- but you must have it with ice cream "because the cherries are so taaahht." It took me two or three visits to realize she meant tart. They were. In time I came to dine there with the late Jack Aulis, a newspaper columnist who as a Marine had left an arm on some god-forsaken Pacific island during World War II. When Jack arrived, Nell would fly to the cash register and bring back a fresh flower bud, often a rose, that she cut each week to put in Jack's lapel. It was one of the most civil things I ever saw. This place isn't the same without Nell Styron.

And then there was Mary Garber of Winston-Salem, who died Sept. 19 at 92. I didn't know her personally, but I watched her work for decades. She was unique -- a pioneering woman sports writer in a profession that for a long time was dominated almost exclusively by men. She wrote for the Twin City Sentinel and the Winston-Salem Journal, starting in the 1940s when men were away at war and women did a lot of the work. Somehow she survived and thrived after the war, undergoing the indignities of not having the same access to athletes for so long. My first sight of her was in my high school days, when my school, Greensboro Page, was playing basketball at Winston-Salem Reynolds. A diminutive creature hardly five feet tall, wearing some sort of close-knit cap hung with sewn-on bangles was writing things on a notepad and talking to the coaches. I asked a friend from Winston-Salem who in the world that was, and was told, "Oh, that's Miss Mary Garber. She covers sports." I never met her, but in coming years I'd see her at high school or college games, often with one of those funny hats, always with a pad, always asking questions and always working. She was one of the many people that made life in this state somehow different, and almost always better.