Jack C. Landau, a Key Club member of SPJ since 1979, died Aug. 9 in Arlington, Va.
Born Jacob Charles Landau on April 10, 1934, he was an avid supporter of the First Amendment and tirelessly worked to educate and inform the public about the essential role of a free press in modern society.
He co-founded the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and served as its executive director from 1970 to 1985. He was also instrumental
in starting the First Amendment Hotline, a free service offering First Amendment and FOI-related legal advice to journalists.
With an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a law degree from New York University, Landau used his journalistic and legal training to report
Washington, D.C., political news and fight for the exposure of governmental information in the public interest. While leading the Reporters Committee, Landau and the organization sued to release more than 40 million documents and recordings from the Nixon administration, with which he was familiar because of his previous post as press secretary to Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell.
Landau also held a number of reporting posts with various outlets, including the Bergen Evening Record, The Associated Press, Newhouse News Service and the Washington Post. In 1996, he was inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame.
[b]Mary GarberThe woman who broke gender barriers in sports reporting, Mary Garber, died Sept. 21 in Winston-Salem, N.C. She had been an SPJ member for more than 30 years.
Garber was born April 19, 1916. She graduated in 1938 from Hollins College (now University) in Virginia with a philosophy degree. Although she didn’t study journalism, Garber went to work after
college writing for the general news and society pages of Winston-Salem’s Twin City Sentinel. Her transition to sports writing came during World War II, when the regular male sports writers were drafted into military service. In 1946, she was placed permanently on the sports staff.
Aware of her underdog status as a female in a male-dominated profession, Garber tried to give back to other underrepresented populations. She covered athletics at black high schools and colleges during a time when most news reporters overlooked such sporting events.
In 2005, Garber became the first woman to receive the Associated Press Sports Editors Red Smith Award, given annually for major contributions to sports journalism. The Association for Women in Sports Media presents an annual honor, the Mary Garber Pioneering Award, for female role models in sports journalism.
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