Columnist retires after 22 years

After more than two decades of writing a weekly column about her favorite place in the world, Pine Creek resident Wanda Wiggins has passed the torch to a neighbor.

Karen Merlak, who lives just down the road from Wiggins, took over writing the Pine Creek News at the beginning of November.

Wiggins, 83, said she is pleased to see the column she enjoyed writing for 22 years continue.

“Karen is doing a good job. I ‘m glad she could do it,” she said.

The column appears in the Tri-County Press and Mt. Morris Times, two of four papers published by Ogle County newspapers..

Wiggins took over the column in January of 1988 from her cousin Mary Wragg, who wrote it for many years before that.

From the start, the column has centered on the people who live in Pine Creek and the activities at Pine Creek Christian Church.

“Mary wrote the column about the church’s 50th anniversary, and I wrote about its 100th anniversary,” Wiggins said.

Wiggins’ family were early settlers of Pine Creek Township and she has lived there most of her life.

Some of her earliest memories are of the church and attending with her parents, six brothers and sisters, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

“The church has always been a part of my life and my family’s,” she said.

Wiggins attended Eureka College after graduating from Polo Community High School, and while she was there she met Tom, her husband of almost 60 years.

Shortly after they were married in 1950, they settled in Pine Creek and both taught school nearby.

They raised their sons there and now have 14 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.

“I wanted to write the Pine Creek  News  because I love Pine Creek. It’s my home and was my parents’ home,” she said.

To meet the newspaper deadline, Wiggins said she sometimes wrote the column at 5 a.m. Monday after she had all the information gathered from the previous week.

Once typed out, for years she drove the column to the newspaper office.

Technology assisted, though, in recent years, and a fax machine saved her the weekly trips to Polo or Oregon.

Besides the column, Wiggins also wrote a book, “Pine Creek People, Places, & Time” in 2001 about the township, its residents, and its history.

“Perhaps the reason for this book is hopefully that those who are young and younger will one day want to know what like was like in the earlier days of Pine Creek,” Wiggins wrote in the book’s preface.

The book includes many of her recollections about growing up when country schools, dirt roads, and outdoor plumbing were the way of life for rural residents.

The 265-page book includes photographs, old and recent, as well as drawings.