AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Grand Forks, North Dakota, lost a treasure last week when Marilyn Hagerty died at the age of 99. Until last year, she wrote a column at the Grand Forks Herald about North Dakota life.
MIKE JACOBS: She went after the news, whether it was a card party or a banquet or a - some sort of feature story that she had found. She was really good at finding interesting people and writing about them.
RASCOE: Mike Jacobs is the former editor and publisher of the Grand Forks Herald. He says Hagerty herself was kind of a local celebrity. And for a brief moment in 2012, she became a national sensation for her review of the local Olive Garden. Here's one of our colleagues with a reading from it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON, BYLINE: (Reading) The place is impressive. It's fashioned in Tuscan farmhouse with a welcoming entryway. The chicken alfredo at $10.95 was warm and comforting on a cold winter day. The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese. All in all, it is the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks.
RASCOE: That review was praised by many for its simplicity, but also widely mocked, with people ridiculing the idea that a chain like Olive Garden would deserve that kind of praise. Mike Jacobs says it's hard to understand why so many people cared about the review.
JACOBS: I am baffled, and so was she.
RASCOE: Baffled because the point of her columns wasn't to critique the food, as Hagerty explained to CNN.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARILYN HAGERTY: And I don't actually consider myself a food critic. I consider myself a reporter in that I'm telling the people what they can find...
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Yeah.
HAGERTY: ...And what it will be like and how much it will cost.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Right.
HAGERTY: I'm not really dissecting...
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Right.
HAGERTY: ...The meatballs or the shrimp. It's just - I'm trying to describe restaurants.
RASCOE: Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain came to her defense, especially against those snarky comments.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANTHONY BOURDAIN: This is the way much of America eats. And I just thought, actually, this body of work, these 30 years of reviews of dining in North Dakota, is in a sense a history of dining in America. And I just thought, I want to publish this person.
RASCOE: And he did. The compilation of Marilyn Hagerty's Columns was titled "Grand Forks: A History of American Dining In 128 Reviews." As her former editor Mike Jacobs remembers...
JACOBS: She went to McDonald's. She went to Olive Garden. She went to the steakhouses. And she told people what they were going to get and what it was going to cost them.
RASCOE: And she didn't let critics get under her skin.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HAGERTY: I just don't have time for that. I write my columns. I go play bridge. I go to all the sports events at the University of North Dakota. You know, life is too busy for me to worry about things like that.
RASCOE: Marilyn Hagerty in 2012. She died last week from complications of a stroke. She was 99. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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