As Betty Wrenn Day looked back on her years of commitment to the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal while sitting at her desk in the newspaper’s Mathews office, she reminisced on her food column and its growth as it reaches 45 years this month.
“I think it has been a wonderful trip. Each year has been a delight and it has been a wonderful experience to have had this type of job. You meet so many interesting people that you would have never gotten to meet before,” said Day.
She was not always a food columnist for the Gazette-Journal, starting off as an advertising representative.
“Mary Wade Smith, who worked here prior to me, called me and said ‘we have an opening, Betty,’ and that’s how I started. I applied for it and became a member of the staff here (in 1977). I started off in the ad department and I continued being the ad rep when I started my cooking stories. It started to get harder to do both jobs and I had to help manage this office (the Mathews office). I gave up with the ad department not too long after that,” said Day.
The most interesting part of her story is how she started her cooking stories.
“We (the staff) were having lunch, talking about what we could do to make the Gazette-Journal a little bit more readable. Every now and then we would put in a little food column, but not on a regular basis. I said I think if we put in a good food column with recipes, people would enjoy it. So, they all looked at me and said ‘you do it.’ So that’s how I started doing it,” said Day.
And Day did just that. She began the food column in February 1979 and has been committed to it ever since. In those 45 years, she has written more than 2,000 cooking stories. Out of all the stories that she has penned, she cannot choose a favorite, saying she truly enjoyed them all.
“I can’t tell you a favorite. At that moment in time when I am interviewing a person, I have the most interest in them, more than anything else. I can’t say I have a favorite. They were all interesting,” said Day.
Her repertoire includes winning several writing awards. After all of her accomplishments, she keeps pushing to accomplish even more and hasn’t thought for a second about retiring.
“What made me want to stay? I never thought about leaving. It was something I enjoyed and I didn’t want to give it up. When you work with a group of wonderful people, why leave it,” Day asked.
After her years working as a food editor and a businesswoman, she leaves this one piece of advice to those who are starting to find careers in their industry of choice: “Whatever you choose, choose something that you are interested in and you want to learn more about and are willing to work with those who can teach you more about what’s going on,” Day said. “Then you listen and learn as you go along.”