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.
