"I don't have any regrets," Marge Nelson said of her 46-year career in the newspaper business. "It introduced me to a whole new world I wouldn't have known otherwise."

"It was something I never, ever dreamed I would be doing, but I never regretted a minute of it," she continued.

As she wrote in her final column, Marge is most proud that her late husband, Wilbur "Bill" Nelson, established a newspaper for Burnett County in 1962 when none existed and that's when her newspaper career began.

"Before we moved back here, my Dad got excited about the idea and said to Bill 'Why don't you come and start a newspaper,'" Marge explained. "Bill always thought he'd like to be a country editor and we talked about it a lot."

"I didn't know if it was something I wanted to do, but I said to Bill, 'If you think it's what we should do, I'll go along with it," Marge confided.

The couple lived in Woodbury, MN at the time and when Bill came home from work one day he said, 'I think we'll go to Grantsburg.'

That's how the Nelson's came to own this newspaper.

"We were the staff, just the two of us," Marge recalled. "We did everything. We took pictures, we covered meetings, we wrote for advertising — you name it, we did it."

And she's not exaggerating.

"My husband would get the mail, he would take all the business letters, bills, checks, all of that and would sort out all the news releases and I inherited that stack," she said. "I read everything. I would edit them down if I thought they were important, or if I thought our readers would enjoy them or learn something useful from them."

"That was my job every week. I liked it, it didn't bother me one bit."

"I didn't like county board meetings but I didn't mind school board meetings because I knew the school board members," she said of some of her earliest memories of collecting news.

The Nelson's eventually started adding staff, plus they had their son, Gary, who was starting to learn the business from his dad.

After a few years in their initial building, the Nelson's, with the help of banker Walter Jensen, were able to buy the present Burnett County Sentinel building.

"That was a good thing because it put us right in the center of activity," Marge said.

"The newspaper represents a lot of businesses, a lot of people and you have to do a good job. I was proud of what I was doing," she continued.

Bill Nelson passed away in 1975 and for the next dozen or so years Marge and Gary were kind of co-publishers, before she sold the paper to him outright.

" I became his employee. He was very easy to work for," she said.

Gary sold the Sentinel in 1994 and thus ended Marge's day-to-day association with the paper.

But even after Gary sold the paper, Marge continued to submit a column.

"It was stimulating having to put something together each week and no one told me I couldn't," Marge said. "I enjoyed doing that."

She just liked being associated with the paper.

"I am so proud of the Burnett County Sentinel as they continue to provide excellent journalism to the people of western Wisconsin," she praised. "We in this community are lucky to have a local, community-based newspaper of such quality."

The onset of macular degeneration made Marge's job difficult and finally forced her to close the newspapering chapter of her life.

"I feel kind of left out. It was nice being part of the pool, but it is nice to have the pressure off," she said of the bittersweet feelings of turning in her last column last week.

"Tomorrow I won't be thinking what am I going to write for next week," she added with a laugh.

From the $40 used Royal typewriter she started with in 1962 and proceeding well into the computer age, Marge has witnessed a lot of changes in her career.

Now that Marge has put her pen in the inkwell for the last time, she's simply going to be a member of the reading public.

"I'll be a Wednesday-to-Wednesday person now, waiting for the paper to come out," she concluded.

While Bill had been around ink his entire life, Marge was a teacher at one time.

"I felt very comfortable in front of a classroom," Marge said.

She taught at the Karlsborg School, a one-room school house where she had a student in each grade, through eighth grade.

One year during summer school at Superior, she was called to meet the principal of Bruce who was there looking for two teachers.

"He hired us on the spot," she recalled. "I thought 'What a cinch! Only one grade after having the one-room school house.'"

Marge taught fifth grade for several years before switching to fourth grade.

Her teaching took a hiatus when her kids were born.