News Staff

Anything that has been in existence 151 years, gone through four generations of the Ray family as owners and is now under a third corporate hand is bound to have had the opportunity to have experienced a number of good employees. However, none can compare in longevity, consistency and reliability to those qualities demonstrated by Darlene Wierman.

When I walked into the Cassville Democrat office that October day in 1970 and was greeted by Kathryn Mitchell at the front desk, sitting there with her Bible in front of her, I thought this would probably a good place to work. Shortly after that, Bob and Sue Mitchell came in all excited about a new church building site where they had just been for a ribbon cutting for the First Christian Church. I told them my friend Mildred Hare over in the Standard Mutual Ins. office told me there might be an office position opening up because Johnnie Edie was leaving to have a baby. Although I had no knowledge of newspaper publishing, I did have a background in bookkeeping and what a busy office was like, which was my previous job in Colorado where I had been employed as the school district’s executive secretary and bookkeeper for several years.

When I arrived at the Cassville Democrat and met Office Manager Darlene Wierman for the first time, I’m not sure either of us knew what to do with one another. Darlene was a living history of the Democrat, having worked at the paper since 1970, and I was still a greenhorn of a journalist, accepting the first editor job of my career.