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 wit...