Marilyn G. Hagerty

Marilyn Hagerty, a newspaper columnist in Grand Forks who suddenly achieved national fame and won a book contract after writing a positive review of an Olive Garden restaurant in her mid-80s, died of complications from a stroke Tuesday, September 16, 2025. She was 99 years old.

Visitation will be held 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. Sunday, October 5, 2025, at the Amundson Funeral Home Chapel in Grand Forks, North Dakota, with a prayer service held at 5:00 p.m. Visitation will continue 9:30 - 10:30 a.m. Monday, October 6, 2025, at Calvary Lutheran Church in Grand Forks. Memorial service will begin at 10:30 a.m. In lieu of flowers, memorials are preferred to the Marilyn Hagerty Scholarship Endowment at the University of North Dakota. To watch the livestream of the Memorial Service, please use this link: https://vimeo.com/1119871706 

Marilyn was known to her many fans in northeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota for decades as a writer of touching and often humorous stories about ordinary people. A typical Marilyn Hagerty gem was her 1974 profile of a bachelor farmer, Magnus Skytland. He lived without electricity, read by the light of a kerosene lamp and sometimes serenaded himself on his violin. He introduced Marilyn to his favorite horse, Sally, named after a former girlfriend. “I've had three horses named Sally,” he said.

In early March 2012, she turned in her review of what was then a new branch of the restaurant chain in Grand Forks. As was her custom, she did not write a critique but rather described her experience. She reported that the “chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day” and that portions were generous.

Internet wits stumbled upon the story and began mocking her for writing an earnest review of a chain restaurant that big city reviewers would acknowledge with contempt, if at all. Within hours, newspaper reporters in Minneapolis, New York and even Fargo began calling her to ask what she made of all the snarky comments about her article.

She explained that she wasn’t worried about it and didn’t have time to scroll through thousands of social media comments. “I'm working on my Sunday column and I'm going to play bridge this afternoon,” she told one reporter, “so I don't have time to read all this crap.”

This feisty response from a supposedly defenseless North Dakota grandmother endeared her to people around the world. She soon was flying to New York to appear on national TV programs including “Today,” Anderson Cooper’s talk show and “Top Chef,” with Padma Lakshmi. Too busy with interview commitments in New York, she had to decline an invitation to appear on “The Tonight Show.”

During a CBS TV appearance, she remarked, “Some people like to complain about food. It’s got to be pretty bad if I don’t like it.”

Newspapers across the country wrote about her. On March 13, 2012, The Wall Street Journal published a Page 1 story by her son, James R. Hagerty, entitled “When Mom Goes Viral.”

Anthony Bourdain, a New York food writer and television personality, arranged to meet her and persuaded Ecco/HarperCollins to publish a collection of her restaurant reviews, “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 100 Reviews,” published in 2013.

The New York Times wrote about her at length in December 2020, describing how she was doing her work during the Covid pandemic and publishing pictures of her at home.

Marilyn Gail Hansen was born May 30, 1926, in Pierre, S.D. Her father, Mads Hansen, who was born in Denmark and grew up on a farm, worked as a shipping clerk at a wholesale grocery company. Her mother, the former Thyra Linnet, was the daughter of Danish immigrants who lived in Tyler, Minn.

Marilyn was the fourth of five children, coming after Harley, Helen and Walter, and before the youngest, Shirley, familiar much later to readers of Marilyn Hagerty columns written in the form of letters to her sister Shirley in Tucson, Ariz. Though the family lived in town, they raised chickens and kept a cow or two for milk.

When Marilyn was 9 years old, her mother died of breast cancer.

There were few books in the house -- only a Bible and a few Zane Gray westerns. But Mads Hansen made clear his admiration for educated people and told Marilyn that Bob Hipple, the editor of the Pierre Capital Journal, was the smartest man in town.

Marilyn worked on her high school newspaper and was editor of the yearbook. “I was good at typing and although I was terribly shy I found I could step up and ask questions of people for the paper,” she said later.

Her first job in journalism was as an assistant to the editor of an advertising sheet called the Pierre Daily Reminder. When there were blank spaces on the pages, Marilyn wrote short items to fill them and signed them as Reminder Rat.

The editor of the Capital Journal, Mr. Hipple, gave her a summer job. Her duties included gathering snippets of local news. She proved resourceful in her reporting. One of her friends worked as a checkout girl at a grocery store. Marilyn persuaded her friends to quiz women who were buying larger-than-usual amounts of food. Were they expecting guests? That could be news for the Capital Journal.

When she was a sophomore in high school, in 1942, she found her father lying in his bed, dead from a heart attack at the age of 56. Her older brothers served in World War II, leaving the three Hansen sisters to fend for themselves. Marilyn worked as a dish washer and later a waitress at the St. Charles Hotel in Pierre.

Though money was tight, she enrolled at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion in 1944 and majored in journalism. Because most men were away during World War II, women had more chances to take leadership roles on campus. Miss Hansen became editor of the USD student newspaper, the Volante in 1947. When Allen Neuharth returned from infantry service in the Army and enrolled at USD, she hired him as a sports writer. He later became chief executive of Gannett Co. and founder of USA Today.

In 1947, when she had a summer job at the Capital Journal in Pierre, she met Jack Hagerty, who worked for the United Press news service, and they began dating.

She had a job offer from a newspaper in Salt Lake City but turned it down because that would have meant saying goodbye to Hagerty. They married June 19, 1949, and had a honeymoon in Galveston, Texas. He was 30. She was 23.

The Hagertys settled in Bismarck, where he was bureau manager for United Press, a rival to the Associated Press. Marilyn worked as a secretary at the state health department and helped produce a publication for listeners of KFYR, a radio station.

In 1953, the Hagertys moved to Minneapolis when Jack was promoted to manager of the UP bureau. While caring for her children, Marilyn wrote occasionally on a free-lance basis for the UP and became a judge of high school newspapers for the National Scholastic Press Association.

The Grand Forks Herald hired Hagerty as news editor in 1957, and the family moved to Grand Forks, where he eventually became editor of the newspaper.

In the late 1960s, Marilyn became editor of what had been the “society” or “family” pages. That section began to feature many topics beyond the usual weddings and engagements, with an emphasis on food, health and travel.

When Jack Hagerty retired in 1983, she reduced her work schedule to 30 hours a week. She continued to write her column and review restaurants. Some of her columns and features from past decades were collected in a book, “Echoes,” published by the Herald in 1995. She donated profits from the book to fund scholarships for women at UND.

After Jack Hagerty died in 1997, Marilyn continued to write for the Herald, play bridge, support the basketball team and travel. She was a member of the advisory committee for the University of Minnesota at Crookston.

In her column, she joked that she would like to have something named after her–nothing grand like a building or bridge but perhaps something more modest, such as a sewage-pumping station. On Sept. 6, 2002, Mayor Mike Brown officially dedicated the Marilyn Hagerty sewage station, complete with a plaque honoring her, at the corner of 15th Avenue South and Belmont Road.

In October 2012, she won the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media. Past winners included Tim Russert, Garrison Keillor and Katie Couric.

The University of North Dakota in August 2021 awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. UND called her “the voice of Grand Forks for more than half a century” and a “tireless supporter” of the university. In response, she gave a two-minute speech saying that she was getting more credit than she deserved and that she had only been trying to make a living as a reporter. She thanked her supporters for their friendship.

She is survived by her son along with a daughter, Gail Hagerty, a Lutheran minister and retired judge in Bismarck; daughter-in-law Lorraine Li Hagerty; sons-in-law Dale Sandstrom and Curt Werner, and eight grandchildren: Jack Golden, Carrie Sarokin, Anne Sandstrom, Curtis Werner, Annaliese Holst, Mariah Werner, James Lee Hagerty and Carmen Hagerty. Another daughter, Carol Hagerty Werner, died in 2011.