This past week, a load of well wishes headed towards Cassville to greet Jane Bernhardt, who just turned 100 years old. Those well wishes will be followed by large swaths of people traveling down this weekend for her birthday celebration.

In her adopted home of nearly eight decades, Jane has embraced the community ever since she arrived, getting involved in nearly every program and project, while also making sure that all the exploits and accomplishments of the village and its people have been announced, having covered the community for decades for the Herald Independent, and prior to that the Cassville American.

Called, in an interview with the Telegraph Herald in 2017, Cassville’s Community Ambassador, it is too difficult to tell Jane’s story in one edition, or even 10, so here is just a modest salute to a woman who may have a smaller physical presence, has an enormous personality that can bring joy to anyone she is near.

Jane grew up on the south side of Milwaukee, attending the Catholic Schools there.

Now Jane and her late husband, Bernard, both went to Marquette, but that isn’t where they met. Jane had been involved in the Milwaukee Civic Light Opera Company, and they were asked by the Knights of Columbus for singers as they were putting together a show.

Jane was an active member of the Milwaukee Civic Light Opera Company, and she recalled being pushed into a lead role when the person who had it had to leave with her husband, who was being moved due to service for the war effort.

“What do you mean take over?” Jane recalled being exasperated on being asked to take on the role. “They said well you've got a good voice and you could do it,” she recalls the response.

Jane got very involved in the company, even cowriting one of their original productions.

So, of course, Jane was asked to be in the Knights of Columbus show. It was then that she met her future husband.

“I was one of them, and went to the rehearsal and met this guy, who was in dental school at the time,” Jane recalled of their meeting. “He was telling me he was from this little town and I said, ‘oh my gosh, you gotta be kidding.’ And here I am, right?”

At some point, Jane must have mentioned that she attended weekly services at Gesu Church, which is in the heart of the Marquette campus. Sure enough, Bernard changed his own time of going to service, and bumped into her after church one morning, and they went to breakfast.

When they met, Jane wasn’t actually attending Marquette yet. It was wartime when she had graduated high school, and with so many of the men being drafted, Jane joined many women into the workforce.

A munitions factory was being opened in Milwaukee, to make 50-caliber rounds for machine guns, and Jane had applied to work there. Instead of getting a line job for assembly, Jane was taken off to the side and asked to be part of the quality control group for the factory. Jane was task ed with coming up with checklists for workers to make sure their tools were calibrated, and the process was followed to make sure each ordinance would work for the soldiers on the line of war.

“For some reason, they pulled my name aside and and told these quality control engineers that here is a possible person that you would want,” Jane remembers. She could only surmise that it was because in high school, instead of taking typing and shorthand like three-quarters of her class did, she was one of one-quarter of the class that instead took phyisics and chemistry.

So this is why Jane helped with quality control systems throughout the plant. “I was the first one in that office and so I helped design charts, and train a group of other hires for the department, who would go out and monitor what was going on whether people at the machines were doing the right thing and charting and so forth.”

She had always planned to eventually go to college, so in the evenings after the munitions plant, Jane took courses at UW-Milwaukee.

The wages were great, but as things were coming to a close with the plant, Jane thought it was now time to go to college. At first, she was leaning towards nursing - Marquette had a scholarship offer for those enrolled, and she thought it would fit well with the quality control position she had been doing.

However, she was talked out of it by some of her friends, who thought Jane might prefer where they were - in the basement of Johnston Hall (the campus’ oldest building) where the journalism department was, and still is to this day.

“Why don't you try journalism?” she remembers them telling her. “The first year is the same anyhow,” she remembered they continued, the same basic courses, so she would be able to switch if she wanted.

But it was not just getting to hang out with her friends in the same classes, Jane found something she really enjoyed studying journalism, something that would pretty much with her the rest of her adult life. “That somehow kicked in some interest in me and in writing, and so after the first year that that sounds pretty good. I think I will stay in journalism. I kind of like that.”

She made the rounds of all the Marquette publications - the Tribune newspaper, and became Editor of the Hilltop, the yearbook.

She graduated Marquette, and knowing she wanted to start a future with Bernard, went to Bruce Publishing in Milwaukee while Bernard was finishing up dental school. Bruce was a Catholic publishing company, and Jane covered a number of tasks in that job - writing book jackets, handling publicity for books, as well as handling the company’s newsletter.

When Bernard graduated, the couple headed off to Ber nard’s hometown Cassville, where he always had planned to return to and work with his father, also a dentist.

For Jane, it was a big change. “In Milwaukee, I had been involved in so many things, but here, I was the new kid on the block,” she quipped.

If you know Jane, she wasn’t a newbie for long, getting involved in the community that, with the exception of a few years they had to live in Colorado while Bernard served in the Army Dental Corps, has been her home for nearly eight decades.

Of course, one of the first things she became involved in revolved around music.

The high school music teacher had gotten ill before Christmas, and Jane was asked to take over the music classes before the Holidays. “She'll just be gone for a couple of weeks until she recovers,” Jane remembers being told.

The teacher never did return.

So Jane started taking teaching courses at UWPlatteville to be able to continue teaching, and get her teaching certificate.

She was only there one year because her and Bernard’s family was starting to grow.

The excursion to Colorado took place, and when they returned, and had their four children, St. Charles was asking her to teach. After some more courses at UW-Platteville, she taught fourth grade until one of her children was in her class, and she decided to hang up her teaching cap.

Of course, with her journalism background, it also did not take long for the community’s newspaper - the Cassville American - to come calling.

Now papers since they were established in southwest Wisconsin in the mid1800s had what are called correspondence - they would be lines like “Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson visited Mrs Jones on Sunday and played bridge,” as an example.

“I said, ‘I can't do that, you know,’ so I started writing stories about…” Jane recalled.

And stories about, well everything that has and would take place over the decades. For decades, first with the Cassville America, and later when it was merged into the Herald Independent, Jane wrote about what was going on with the schools, what was going on with the village, what was happening at Stonefield, what was going to happen at Twin-O-Rama, and what was happening with the people and businesses throughout the community.

And she continued to get involved in everything as well. The Cassville Historical Society, Stonefield Endowment Trust Fund, the Friends of Stonefield and Nelson Dewey State Park, she has been a part of each organization. She directed the St. Charles Catholic Church choir, and has been president of the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women She said that when she was indoctrinated into the community when she came here, she embraced it. “It was very, very neighborly, everybody knew everybody, okay?” Jane said. “And if you belong to one organization, you belong to a bunch of them.”

It also fed into Jane being able to be plugged into the heartbeat of the community knowing what was happening.

“Just being in touch with everything that I used to be in touch with,” Jane recalled, having in the last few years stepped back from being Cassville correspondent for the Herald Independent, handing the reigns off to relative Susan Bernhardt.

Being that plugged in before, stepping aside “is a little bit hard to accept….. Not knowing what's going on. That's a little hard to accept.”

“But by the same token, you know, I'm so happy that there are people that step up and take over and carry on and, you know, the village board and school board and everything else,” Jane added.

For Jane, while she may not be reporting anymore, making sure the stories of the community are told is important to her. She recalls that she was going to a rededication of the USS Wisconsin years ago, and she called up a local daily newspaper, asking them if they were sending anyone to the ceremony, considering different ties to the region the ship has had. They said no. So Jane said she would bring back some things to help cover the event.

Covering the things she is tied to, be it Cassville or the schools or the different parks and historic sites - those are places that should have their stories told, m and Jane was going to make sure they were.

On her longevity, Jane said she has no secret - she was blessed with good genes that led to other family members hitting the century mark like she did Jan. 11.

She is reluctantly going along with her children on throwing a big bash for the milestone this weekend. “My children, are using using my 100th birthday as an excuse for a big party,” Jane joked, noting that she has been kept out of the planning.

They took all her photo albums to get pictures of her life. They have friends and family coming from across the country.

While she may slightly protest, this weekend when surrounded by so many of those she loved that are still here, Jane Bernhardt will be wearing that open smile all those who know and cherish her think of fondly, carrying that upbeat and optimistic face that is easily recognizable throughout the decades.