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...
Diverse viewpoints needed in town government
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...
Newspapers still best place for legal notices
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...
Tablet resurrects love of technology
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,...
Using public money for private schools is a step backward
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...
Scrapbook offers glimpse of early years in rural Ontario and Wilton
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...
A newpaper's obligation is to the public good
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...
Wisconsin winter creates predicaments in a bird's life
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...
Libraries fill ever-changing role in small towns
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...
Though dated, Kubrick’s ‘Lolita’ still appalling
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor I finally got around to watching the movie “Lolita” last weekend. OK, it was made in 1962, and I'm a little behind on pop culture. But for most of my life, I have known that the term "Lolita" was a cultural reference to a sexually...
