GRAND FORKS — Marilyn Hagerty, lifelong newspaperwoman, longtime Grand Forks Herald columnist and nationally famous food critic, has died.

Hagerty died Tuesday morning, Sept. 16, 2025, at the age of 99. She is survived by her son, James “Bob” Hagerty; a daughter, Gail Hagerty; and eight grandchildren. Her younger daughter, Carol Hagerty Werner, died in 2011.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

“This is news of great impact at the Herald, for our employees as well as for the thousands upon thousands of readers who have followed Marilyn’s life through the pages of this newspaper for well over a half-century,” said Herald Publisher Korrie Wenzel. “Her contributions to the Herald — not only in print but as an ambassador for our product — have been countless. Her work ethic, wit and her wonderfully polite demeanor will forever be missed.”

Former Herald Publisher Mike Maidenberg, who now lives in California, said Hagerty was “the anchor that held the Herald together through the years.” Maidenberg was publisher of the Herald from 1982 to 2003.

“Her chatty columns masked a superb journalist who knew a good story and how to pursue it relentlessly,” Maidenberg said. “She was wide-ranging, tough but fair. She saw every reader as a source.”

Mike Jacobs, longtime editor and later publisher between Maidenberg and Wenzel, recalled Hagerty as someone who couldn’t be overlooked.

“The real great thing about her is that she found people to write about,” Jacobs said. “She must have written several thousand columns for the Herald over the years — she was there for a very long time. She was a remarkable woman, a remarkable journalist.”

A search of archives shows that Hagerty’s first byline in the Herald appears to have been nearly 67 years ago, on Oct. 20, 1957. It was under the headline “Five Sisters’ Team Tops Bowling League.”

The first paragraph: “When the five Miller sisters of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks get together each Thursday night, the pins really fly.”

Not many bylines followed until 1959, when she began regular contributions under the header “News of Women.” Eventually, she moved out from under that restrictive header and many more stories followed, most of which were traditional feature reports about the people of Greater Grand Forks.

The archives indicate that her food column, titled “Eatbeat,” started in February 1986. In recent years, Hagerty was perhaps best known for a 2012 viral restaurant review of the Grand Forks Olive Garden that launched her briefly to online superstardom.

The review — one of her regular Eatbeat columns, written while she was in her 80s — offered a folksy, no-frills review of the new Grand Forks location of the Italian chain restaurant. When the review gained traction online, it was initially met with snark and derision, but just as quickly as the teasing started, thousands came to Hagerty’s defense, including celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.

In this file photo from 2012, Marilyn Hagerty and then-Grand Forks Herald Publisher Mike Jacobs share a laugh as they check out a T-shirt with her image. (Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald / Forum News Service)

The whirlwind landed Hagerty on a television media circuit that included the Anderson Cooper Show, Piers Morgan Tonight, Good Morning America, the Today Show and a spot as guest judge on Top Chef. The media circus also resulted in her book, “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews,” with a forward by Bourdain. In Bourdain’s forward, he described the collection of reviews as a “straightforward account of what people have been eating — still ARE eating — in much of America. As related by a kind, good-hearted reporter looking to pass along as much useful information as she can — while hurting no one.”

Still, during her life, Hagerty remained ambivalent about her brush with fame.

“I never have known how I feel. I just never have been able to figure it out,” she said in a North Dakota Newspaper Association interview in 2014. “I’ve had so much notoriety, so much of it negative, but also with it has come a lot of positive responses that I never expected in my life to receive. I’ve always wanted to do well and to succeed. I’ve never figured I was a great national hero, or anything like that. I’m a person who is a newspaperwoman, and I want to be remembered as good at what I do.”

Early life

Hagerty was born Marilyn Hansen on May 30, 1926, in Pierre, South Dakota, to parents Thyra and Mads Hansen. She was one of five brothers and sisters.

Growing up in the “Dirty 30s,” she said her family took pride in “making our own way.” From an early age, she was raised to believe in hard work, to get along with others and to make enough money to support herself. She fondly recalled a rowdy childhood with her siblings in Pierre, full of neighborhood baseball games, biking and walking everywhere, and going door to door selling vegetables from her father’s garden.

Thyra Hansen, a homemaker and Tyler, Minnesota, daughter of Danish immigrants, died of cancer when Hagerty was 9. Mads, a Danish immigrant, grocery wholesaler and “farmer at heart,” died at home when Hagerty was 14.

The first summer after her father died, now being raised by her older siblings, Hagerty went to work to help make ends meet. She found a job as a dishwasher at a Pierre restaurant.

“I think from every job you ever have, you learn a lot,” she recalled in the 2014 interview. “I learned certainly how to peel potatoes, and how to make a lot of noise in the basement so the rats wouldn’t get too close to me. I learned how to stack up the dishes, I learned how to swear like Johnny the cook, and I learned I’d rather be a waitress than a dishwasher.”

The next year, she did become a waitress, but soon after she decided cafe work wasn’t for her. That summer, she walked up and down Main Street in Pierre, asking each business if they had work for her.

She was turned down by every business she tried, until her luck turned around at the Pierre Capital Journal. The editor, Robert Hipple, initially turned her away, but seemed to change his mind as she left. He called her back in and offered her a summer job organizing his office and filing his letters.

Thus began Hagerty’s career in newspapers in 1943. She was a junior in high school.

Before long, Hagerty’s job at the Capital Journal had expanded — she was tasked with writing city briefs for the back page of the paper, and each day took her notebook around town putting together small local news items. She went on to study journalism at the University of South Dakota, where she would eventually become editor of the school paper.

Hagerty was deeply influenced by her father’s great respect for newspapers and the people who created them, as well as the South Dakota journalists who took her under their wing as she established herself as a young reporter.

“Those years were good years,” she recalled.

“I tell people, there’s someone out there who will help you if you just let them,” she said. “There’s always someone — in my case, it was journalists.”

She graduated from USD in 1948 at a time when most women went to college to find a husband, and those who did work in newsrooms did so as assistants and clerks. Instead, Hagerty got her first reporting job in 1948 at the Aberdeen (South Dakota) American News.

She recalled being hired along with two men. The three received their job assignments at the same time – one man was assigned the cops beat, and the second the region and agriculture beat. Hagerty was assigned assistant to the paper’s elderly society editor, one of the few editorial jobs typically held by women.

“I just sat there seething,” Hagerty recalled. “As soon as he was through with us, I went into (the editor’s) office and said, ‘I didn’t go to college four years to be an assistant.’ … And he said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ He said, ‘I’ll see that you get better assignments.’”

And Hagerty was given better assignments — although she was still expected to fill in for the society editor occasionally. While at the American News, she covered the school board, the hospital and wrote features.

Still, she later said the vast difference in expectations for men and women in newsrooms during her career was “pretty pathetic.”

“It was pretty clear that if you were a woman, you were not ever to have designs on being managing editor, or anything like that,” she said. “Women have come so far in the newsroom since I came out of the University of South Dakota that it’s almost unbelievable. I used to be amazed at women who got a halfway decent job. Now, women are leaders as well, and as you well know, it’s all the same.”

Settling in Grand Forks

Hagerty met Jack Hagerty in 1947, the summer before she was a senior at USD. Jack, a United Press journalist, arrived to provide vacation relief for another local reporter.

When Jack got to town, a mutual friend asked Hagerty if she’d like to go out with him.

“I said, ‘I’d like to know how tall he is, because last time you hooked me up with a date, this guy was about up to my shoulder, and he did not have a good time and neither did I,’ ” Hagerty said.

The mutual friend called Jack, asked for his height, and relayed the answer back to Hagerty. It was satisfactory. The pair went out that night, and every other night for Jack’s entire stay in Pierre.

They were married on June 19, 1949, at a Lutheran church in Montevideo, Minnesota. They settled in Bismarck, where Jack continued to work for the United Press and Hagerty worked at the KFYR radio station until their first child was born in 1953.

The young family eventually followed Jack’s career to Minneapolis, where they stayed for four years. In 1957, they moved to Grand Forks, where Jack had taken a job as news editor of the Herald. He later became editor.

In those years, Marilyn Hagerty “did whatever I could to keep my finger in the pie,” judging high school newspapers for the National Scholastic Press Association and taking regular assignments for Womenswear Daily. In the 1960s, she began writing weekly stories for the Herald’s Farm and Home tab, and eventually took on school board coverage, as well.

As her three kids got older, she worked up to full-time at the Herald in 1961, and, as she described it, “one thing led to another,” and eventually became features editor.

As features editor, she wrote regular columns for the paper. Eventually — inspired by larger newspapers — she began to wonder, why not have a food column or a restaurant review in the Herald?

“I know — because we don’t have enough (fine) restaurants. We’d be done in five weeks,” she said. “But then I thought, why couldn’t I do area restaurants? The truck stops? That’s where people here eat. They want to know what the food’s like and what it costs.”

The first Eatbeat column was printed in the Herald in the 1980s to a “hail” of community response, Hagerty recalled.

“I thought, this is just something I do on Wednesday,” she recalled. “Just kind of something I throw in there to try to embellish the food section. And yet it’s getting the most attention, while all these things I thought were gems were just going by the wayside.”

In her career, she wrote approximately 2,000 Eatbeat columns.

Hagerty retired from full-time newspapering in 1991, and retired her regular Eatbeat columns during the COVID-19 pandemic. But to her great pride, for decades, she didn’t miss a single weekly column.

She quietly stopped writing columns nearly a year ago. The final paragraph of her final column, on Oct. 26, 2024, read, “right now, there’s a cool streak in the air. A delightful time of year.”

‘A treasure for our city’

While she may be best known across the country for her viral Olive Garden Review, Hagerty was best known locally for her vibrant personality and support of all things Grand Forks.

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Everyone wanted to be her “Cheerful Person of the Week.” It was a coveted honor. But while so many brought cheer into her life, she will be best remembered for the joy she brought to others.

Going to lunch with Hagerty was equivalent to dining with the Queen of England. Restaurants would roll out the figurative red carpet for Hagerty as they hoped to get a promising Eatbeat review in the coming days and weeks. She was a pillar of community events, even having a lift station named after her in 2014 , and often attended UND women’s basketball games to show her support for the Fighting Hawks.

“Marilyn is a treasure for our city, the state and the nation,” UND President Andrew Armacost said in 2021 after announcing Hagerty would be receiving an honorary doctorate from the university. “Her decades of service as a journalist have brought many stories to life and impacted each of us.”

Even after Hagerty retired her Eatbeat column, she continued to write her Happenings column for the Herald. The columns detailed events and life in and around Grand Forks with a friendly twist and light-hearted humor.

“I was interested in what people do and keeping up with other people,” Hagerty said in a 2021 story when she received the honorary doctorate from UND. “It was kind of my mission to do that and major in journalism because my father, who was an immigrant, thought that newspapers were so wonderful.”

Hagerty published three collections of her stories and columns throughout her decades-long career at the Herald: “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews,” “Echoes; a Selection of Stories and Columns by Marilyn Hagerty” and “The Best of The Eatbeat with Marilyn Hagerty.”

In 2012, following the Olive Garden review ballyhoo, she received the USA Today Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in Journalism. Neuharth — a South Dakota native and 1950 graduate of USD — told Hagerty that to him, she typified the people who work for medium-sized newspapers who play a distinct role in journalism.

“I was with all these famous journalists, and then, ‘Marilyn who?’ ” she recalled. “That was certainly the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

Neuharth — who went on to found USA Today — credited Hagerty with helping him get his start in journalism.

“Marilyn, my classmate back in the ’40s and editor of the student paper, took a chance on me as a rookie reporter, hired me for my first newspaper job and taught me vital lessons about the roles and responsibilities of professional journalists,” Neuharth said in a statement issued at the time. “Those same high principles that Marilyn preached as a young college editor 65 years ago define and distinguish her extraordinary and enduring career.”

In 2017, Hagerty was presented with the the UND Alumni Association and Foundation’s Spirit Award, given to outstanding alumni or friends of the university. At that same ceremony, she received an honorary master’s degree in community engagement from the late UND Provost Tom DiLorenzo.

“I think my friends at the University of South Dakota would forgive me for becoming a North Dakotan,” she said in her speech accepting the Spirit Award. “But it’s where you’re planted. And I was planted in Grand Forks, and I couldn’t be happier.”

One mainstay from Hagerty’s time at the Herald has been a column she wrote more than 40 years ago at Christmastime. The Herald has republished the piece dozens of times over the years.

It begins with “Excuse me, please. But it’s Christmas Eve, and I must go home.”

Former Herald reporter Sydney Mook contributed to this report.

St. Olaf football player Matthew Lee was fatally shot inside a South St. Paul home early Friday after another man tried to rob the shooter, charges filed Tuesday say.

Terrell Anthony Ranzy, 19, of St. Paul, fired several shots when Keith Woodson Cox, 20, pulled out a gun, pointed it at Ranzy and said “I ain’t going to lie, I need you to give me all that (expletive),” referring to Ranzy’s gun, charges say.

Lee, a junior linebacker at the private liberal arts college in Northfield, was hit twice by the gunfire and died at the scene. Woodson Cox had gunshot wounds to his arms and torso and was rushed to the hospital.

A witness told police that Lee was an “innocent bystander,” according to a criminal complaint in Dakota County District Court charging Ranzy with second-degree unintentional murder, second-degree manslaughter and possession of a firearm by an ineligible person.

Lee was a 2023 South St. Paul High School graduate who went home to South St. Paul to visit his mother, grandfather and friends because the football team did not have a game Saturday, St. Olaf football coach James Kilian told the Pioneer Press on Friday.

Lee, an economics major, was a “great teammate. Friends with everybody on the team,” Kilian said. “Smiled. Always had a great attitude.”

Ranzy ran from the home in the 300 block of Second Avenue South after the shooting and was arrested about two hours later hiding in a shed three blocks away, the complaint says.

Ranzy had a first appearance on the charges Tuesday and remained jailed in lieu of $750,000, which was requested by the prosecution.

His attorney, assistant public defender Alex Vian, asked that he be released on $10,000 conditional bail, arguing that he was robbed at gunpoint and that he defended himself. He’s due back in court Sept. 25.

Hanging out

According to the complaint, officers responded to the scene about 3:45 a.m. Friday.

People outside of the house told officers an unresponsive man was in an upstairs bedroom. Officers tried to open the door, but Lee’s body was blocking it. Officers could not find a pulse and he was declared dead.

Woodson Cox was also in the bedroom with a tourniquet on his left arm.

A black Glock handgun was on a table in the room.

Officers were told there were several people in the home and in the bedroom at the time of the shooting. After speaking with witnesses, they learned the following, according to the complaint:

Woodson Cox, Ranzy, Lee and others were hanging out that evening and eventually went to the South St. Paul home around 3 a.m.

Terrell Anthony Ranzy (Courtesy of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office)

In the bedroom, Woodson Cox and Ranzy each had a gun and were comparing them. Woodson Cox’s gun was a Glock 19 with a tan magazine. Ranzy’s gun was an “XD” with a black magazine.

Woodson Cox told Ranzy that he should always “keep one up top,” meaning keep a round in the chamber, the complaint states.

Woodson Cox and Lee went into a bathroom together next to the bedroom. While in the bathroom, Woodson Cox told Lee and a witness that he was going to rob Ranzy of his gun. Both Lee and the witness told Woodson Cox not to do it.

After leaving the bathroom, they returned to the bedroom at which time Woodson Cox pulled out his gun and tried robbing Ranzy of his gun. Ranzy fell backward onto the bed and fired his gun into the ceiling, then multiple times from a crouched position, hitting both Woodson Cox and Lee.

The witness said he saw both Woodson Cox and Ranzy fire their guns. Two people in the room jumped out of the window to avoid the gunfire.

Prohibited from possessing guns

In searching the bedroom, officers located 14 discharged casings from two guns.

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After the shooting, Ranzy fled the house, but came back a short time later. He wanted to retrieve his phone, but was not allowed back in and he left again.

Officers found him in the shed in the 500 block of First Avenue South. A search of the shed and the surrounding area did not turn up a firearm.

Ranzy is prohibited from possessing firearms because of a Jan. 31 conviction for threats of violence out of Ramsey County. Court records show he threatened to shoot a family member with a gun at their St. Paul home in July 2024. He was sentenced to three years’ probation.

Ranzy has been wanted since Jan. 9, when he failed to show up for an arraignment in Ramsey County on a misdemeanor citation for possession of an open bottle of alcohol at Sixth and Cedar streets in downtown St. Paul, court records show.

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans unveiled Tuesday a stopgap spending bill that would keep federal agencies funded through Nov. 21, daring Democrats to block it knowing that the fallout would likely be a partial government shutdown that would begin Oct. 1, the start of the new budget year.

The bill would generally fund agencies at current levels, with a few exceptions, including an extra $88 million to boost security for lawmakers and members of the Supreme Court and the executive branch. The proposed boost comes as lawmakers face an increasing number of personal threats, with their concerns heightened by last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

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The House is expected to vote on the measure by Friday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he would prefer the Senate take it up this week as well. But any bill will need some Democratic support to advance through the Senate, and it’s unclear whether that will happen.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries have been asking their Republican counterparts for weeks for a meeting to negotiate on the bill, but they say that Republicans have refused. Any bill needs help from at least seven Democrats in the Senate to overcome procedural hurdles and advance to a final vote.

“They can try and play the blame game, but their actions tell a different story,” Schumer said. “Their actions show they clearly want to shut things down because they don’t want to negotiate with Democrats.”

Republicans say it’s Democrats who are playing politics by insisting on addressing health coverage concerns as part of any government funding bill. In past budget battles, it has been Republicans who’ve been willing to engage in shutdown threats as a way to focus attention on their priority demands. That was the situation during the nation’s longest shutdown, during the winter of 2018-19, when President Donald Trump was insisting on federal funds to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

This time, however, Democrats are facing intense pressure from their base of supporters to stand up to Trump. They have particularly focused on the potential for skyrocketing health care premiums for millions of Americans if Congress fails to extend enhanced subsidies, which many people use to buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange. Those subsidies were put in place during the COVID crisis, but are set to expire.

Johnson called the debate over health insurance tax credits a December policy issue, not something that needs to be solved in September.

“It’ll be a clean, short-term continuing resolution, end of story,” Johnson told reporters. “And it’s interesting to me that some of the same Democrats who decried government shutdowns under President Biden appear to have no heartache whatsoever at walking our nation off that cliff right now. I hope they don’t.”

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Writer

Charlie Kirk’s mastery of social media was key to his rise as an influence in conservative politics. So the extent to which his death and its aftermath have played out on those forums shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In a microcosm of life today, social media is where Americans have gone to process last week’s killing in Utah and is the chief tool his supporters are using to police those they feel aren’t offering proper respect. Investigators are probing the time the man accused of killing Kirk, Tyler Robinson, spent in the “dark corners of the internet” — anti-social media, if you will — leading up to when he allegedly pulled the trigger.

On the other side of the world, as the Kirk story preoccupied Americans, Nepal reeled from a spasm of violence that erupted when the government tried to ban social media platforms.

All of this is forcing a closer look at the technologies that have changed our lives, how they control what we see and understand through algorithms, and the way all the time we spend on them affects our view of the world.

Cox emerges as powerful spokesman against social media

Utah’s governor, Republican Spencer Cox, believes “cancer” isn’t a strong enough word to describe social media. “The most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage … and get us to hate each other,” Cox said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, urged Americans via social media to “pull yourself together, read a book, get some exercise, have a whiskey, walk the dog or make some pasta or go fishing or just do anything other than let this algo pickle your brain and ruin your soul.”

Chilling videos of Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination immediately overwhelmed sites like X, TikTok and YouTube, and companies are still working to contain their spread. Confrontational material and conspiracy theories are pushed into social media feeds because they do precisely what they’re designed to do — keep people on the platforms for longer periods of time.

“I do think we’re in a moment here,” said Laura Edelson, a Northeastern University professor and expert on social media algorithms. “Our country is being digitally mediated. Where we interact with other people, how we interact with broader society, that is more and more happening over feed algorithms. This is the most recent in a long line of ways that society has been changed by media technology.”

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Divisive content and the proliferation of the video of Kirk’s death may not have been the goal but are the direct result of decisions made to maximize profits and cut back on content moderation, Edelson said.

“I don’t think there are people twirling their mustaches saying how great it is that we’ve divided society, except the Russian troll farms and, more and more, the Chinese troll farms,” she said.

X owner Elon Musk posted on his site this past week that while discourse can become negative, “it’s still good there is a discussion going.” Conservative media star Ben Shapiro, who considered Kirk a friend, admired how Kirk was willing to go to different places and talk to people who disagreed with him, a practice all too rare in the social media era.

“How social media works is a disaster area, fully a disaster area,” Shapiro said in an interview with Bari Weiss on a Free Press podcast. “There’s no question it’s making the world a worse place — and that’s not a call for censorship.”

How people act on social media is a bipartisan problem, said Shapiro. The most pervasive one is people who use the third-person plural — “they” are doing something to “us,” he said. That’s been the case when many people discuss Kirk’s death, although the shooter’s motives haven’t become clear and there’s no evidence his actions are anything other than his own.

Collecting inflammatory posts from both sides

The liberal MeidasTouch media company has collected inflammatory social posts by conservatives, particularly those who suggest they’re at “war.” Meanwhile, several conservatives have combed social media for posts they consider negative toward Kirk, in some cases seeking to get people fired. The Libs of TikTok site urged that a Washington state school district be defunded because it refused to lower flags to half staff.

GOP Rep. Randy Fine of Florida asked people to point out negative Kirk posts from anyone who works in government, at a place that receives public funding or is licensed by government — a teacher or lawyer, for instance. “These monsters want a fight?” he wrote on X. “Congratulations, they got one.”

A Washington Post columnist, Karen Attiah, wrote Monday that she was fired for a series of BlueSky posts that expressed little sympathy for Kirk. But she wrote on Substack that “not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.” A Post spokeswoman declined to comment.

So much of what people use to talk about politics — algorithmically driven social media sites and cable television — is designed to pull Americans apart, said James Talarico, a Democratic state lawmaker in Texas who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate. “We’ve got to find our way back to each other because that’s the only way we can continue this American experiment,” he said on MSNBC.

Among the most persistent examples of those divisions are the lies and misinformation about elections that have spread for years through online social channels. They have undermined faith in one of the country’s bedrock institutions and contributed to the rage that led supporters of President Donald Trump to violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Whether meaningful change is possible remains an open question. Nepal’s unrest illustrated the dangers of government involvement: Social media sites were shut down and users protested, suggesting it had been a way to stop criticism of government. Police opened fire at one demonstration, killing 19 people.

Persuading social media sites to change their algorithms is also an uphill battle. They live off attention and people spending as much time as possible on them. Unless advertisers flee for fear of being associated with violent posts, there’s little incentive for them to change, said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at EMarketer.

Young people in particular are becoming aware of the dangers of spending too much time on social media, she said.

But turn their phones off? “The reality of the situation,” Enberg said, “is that there’s a limit to how much they can limit their behavior.”

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.