Sarah L. GreeneGilmer MirrorHall of Fame Class of 2010Sarah L. Greene, publisher of The Gilmer Mirror from 1974 to 2006 and president of the Texas Press Association, 1995-96, is a third-generation newspaperwoman, following her parents, the late Georgia and Russell H. Laschinger, and grandfather, George Tucker, as publisher of The Gilmer Mirror. George Tucker purchased the newspaper in 1915. The fourth generation is Sarah Greene’s son William R. “Russ” Greene, publisher of The Gilmer Mirror since 2006. Long before high school, Sarah Greene got experience in such jobs as collecting for subscriptions door-to-door, distributing funeral notices to stores and running election results. During World War II, when the absence of advertising lead to cutting back The Gilmer Mirror from a daily to weekly publication, the staff dwindled down to a basic two – her parents, Russell and Georgia Laschinger. These were Greene’s high school years and she remembers telling her mother that she would never go into the newspaper business for she never meant to work that hard. Greene went to Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., for two years. But in her junior year at the University of Texas, she capitulated into the journalism news sequence. She worked for the Daily Texan, making many late night trips to the campus press as news editor to put the paper to bed. Her reporting experiences proved invaluable when she hit the job market. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1949. In June following graduation, she joined The Dallas Morning News and worked for three years as a city staff reporter. She left for Fort Worth after her marriage in 1952 to Ray H. Greene, then a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter. In 1953 they accepted an invitation to move to Gilmer and join the family business. While the Greene children, Sally and Russ, were small she worked mostly as a reporter, feature writer and proof reader, gradually taking on more duties as they grew up. She became co-publisher after the death of her father in 1974. As writer and publisher, Greene has won many awards and honors. She twice received the Anson Jones Award of the Texas Medical Association for outstanding reporting of medical news. In 1996 the Association for Women Journalists, at a banquet in Dallas, honored her and 89 other “trailblazers” with a “Woman of Courage” award for showing “leadership, tenacity and integrity in working to improve conditions for women both in and out of the profession.” In 2004, she received the National Newspaper Association’s Emma C. McKinney Memorial Award, presented annually to a newspaper woman for distinguished service to the community press, the only Texan ever to receive the award. The Gilmer native is the second woman elected to serve as Texas Press Association president, in 1995-96. She was president of North and East Texas Press Association in 1989-90. Greene was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2010 as one of four members of the Hall’s fourth class of honorees.
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