By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
A reader took exception to my column a few weeks ago about the grassroots government of town boards. It was his observation that government in the town of Plymouth was at least as rife with “cronyism, nepotism and favoritism” as any larger unit of government, if not more so.
Indeed, I did recall that Plymouth appeared to play politics at a higher RPM than did most rural towns. Plymouth geographically nuzzles up against Elroy, and perhaps city politics rubs off.
That excuse cannot be applied to Ridgeville, where political strife continues long after the uproar over wind turbines subsided several years ago. It’s dizzying
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
March has come and gone, and the usual feasting on pancakes and hot dogs has gone missing.
Not to put a too sentimental point on it, but I feel a touch of nostalgia for the customer appreciation days that blossomed like the first spring crocuses at Degenhardt Implement and the Hillsboro Farmers Co-op.
I guess each business did have some sort of event, but I didn’t hear about it, and
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
Here’s something to contemplate as we slog our way through this never-ending winter: Why are rural women so shy?
While I was chatting with a fellow town of Forest resident, it occurred to me that in my 30 years of running this newspaper, not once have I known of a woman town chairperson. For that matter, I can’t think of even a female supervisor. Invariably, they fill the usual roles, taking notes as clerk and writing
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
March 10-16 is Sunshine Week. OK, I know it has looked more like Cold Wet Slushy Snow Week, but for we media folk, it is another opportunity to rag on you about the importance of transparency in government and how crucial it is to the health of our democracy.
Now, don’t drop into a snooze. We’ve been busy doing a
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
It has been 23 years since computers first made a daring appearance at the County Line office. I say “daring” because we were at the dawn of the digital revolution for a small weekly newspaper.
As always, too broke to do it right, I determined to tame this beast on my own rather than hire technical support. I would go home at night to feed the family, and then sneak back to the office and pore
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
I had not heard of the Elmwood School until Steve Olson of Kendall dropped by this week with a short history of the rural school. Once located a few miles from Kendall, it is only a dim memory to most people, but its story is emblematic of the history of public education in this country.
In Elmwood’s case, it was through James Dwyer’s tireless efforts that a school was opened during the winter of 1893. Oddly
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
Bless our readers, who periodically show up with bits and pieces that make good fodder for this column.
The latest is a scrapbook kept by rural Ontario resident Ardys Bredlow’s grandmother, Ethel Wallace. She was of the “waste not want not” era, so it is no surprise that she used an old dis-bound book, carefully gluing newspaper clippings over the pages.
The book itself is a Wisconsin Farmers
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
It was so quiet around the office in January that I almost didn’t mind when the phone rang last week and the caller unleashed a string of profanities. I was starting to think that each week’s newspaper had plunged into a black hole, but here was resounding proof that, yes, indeed, someone was actually reading the latest edition of the County Line.
The caller was furious
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
You may think that the only thing Wisconsin game wardens do is make life miserable for those who fail to obey the state’s hunting and fishing laws. The popular image is of a tough, old, needle-nosed guy with a badge, counting fish in creels or lurking behind a tree, checking to see if someone fires one minute after the end of the
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor
Once upon a time, way back in the last century, I used to spend a lot of time at the public library. When I was a kid, the Arabut Ludlow Memorial Library in Monroe, Wis., seemed a vast warehouse of endlessly entertaining books and magazines.
It was built in the heyday of the Carnegie library building boom, when Andrew Carnegie changed course from ruthless businessman to philanthropist. I can’t tell you if this reversal bought him