Marguerite Herbeck of Hillsboro has lived almost her whole life in Vernon County, but her life experiences have taken her to the skies and into the earth.

Herbeck, now 84, has been a teacher in one-room country schools, a farmwife and mother of three and grandmother, an equal partner with her husband in their excavating business Marell Inc. in Hillsboro and a pilot during the mid 1940s and 1950s.

As a senior in high school, Herbeck, then Marguerite Butcher, was being courted by Elgin Herbeck. She’d known him since they were children.

Elgin, a forward-thinking young man, wanted to get a pilot’s license, but his parents couldn’t afford to let him. That didn’t stop Elgin. He asked Marguerite instead, who at the time was attending the Normal School in Viroqua. She graduated in 1944.

In the summer of 1945, Herbeck moved to Tomah to take flying lessons for a private pilot’s license. Since she was only 20 at the time, Herbeck had to have her mother sign for permission.

At first, Herbeck’s mother balked at the idea.

"She didn’t want to… ’I don’t know if I want to sign your life away,’ but she did," Herbeck recalled.

Young Marguerite, however, had no such fears about flying.

"You just make up your mind this is what I want to do and that’s the way it is," Herbeck said.

She did it and later got her commercial license, too.

To support herself that summer, Herbeck worked in the kitchen while the veteran’s hospital in Tomah was being built. Someone had to feed the workers, she said.

"When we’d get through in the afternoon, then I’d go to the airport and take instruction," Herbeck said.

In 1945, it cost $8 an hour for flying lessons. Herbeck had eight hours of dual flying with the pilot, but she also clocked several solo hours.

"You had a lot of flying time by yourself and eventually you would take a written and flight test to get your private license," she said.

Herbeck passed. Then she taught Elgin.

The same year the couple was married in December of 1945, Elgin purchased their first plane and built their own hanger and state-designated landing strip on their farm in Hillsboro. The landing strip is still there.

The Herbecks also did their own mechanic work on their planes, and owned as many as four planes at one time.

"My husband was pretty good about thinking up ways to make a living," Herbeck said.

In 1946, Marguerite and Elgin became charter members of the Wisconsin Flying Farmers Association. Marguerite was elected as the first secretary/treasurer of the organization and the only woman officer.

"It’s no different than driving a big truck down the road," Herbeck said of flying. "You’ve got to keep your eye on what you’re doing and no drinking and driving."

But being almost 2,000 feet up in the air in a single engine, lightweight plane, is a little different than a two-ton truck. That didn’t bother her.

"If you have something happen you are taught to look for a landing strip," she said.

Wherever Herbeck flew, whether it was taking someone to Milwaukee for parts and supplies, flying cross country to Oklahoma with Elgin for the National Flying Farmers convention or flying one of her lucky contest-winning students from the rural school during the noon hour, Herbeck was always on the lookout for somewhere to land.

"The instructor that I had (at Tomah), he would pull the throttle back and say ’forced landing,’ but he never did that unless he could see the field to go into, too," Herbeck said. "They pull that on you, because they make you aware that this can happen anytime."

It happened to her.

One year, Herbeck and another teacher were flying back from a state teacher’s convention in Milwaukee when "something went a-knocking pretty bad," she said.

Like she had been taught, Herbeck found a safe place to land. Then she called Elgin, who then flew the plane home.

"It was an exhaust stack that blew off, which I didn’t know," Herbeck said. "It didn’t hurt (the plane) anything, it was just very noisy."

Another time, Herbeck was giving a ride to a 65-year-old Hillsboro woman on her birthday when the plane lost one of the wheels on takeoff.

Herbeck felt it snap.

"I looked out and I could see that (the wheel) was gone, but I didn’t know it was hanging from the brake cable," she said.

Herbeck showed no outward signs of panic. She did her flyover the woman’s house and farm, never mentioning the missing wheel.

When the ride was over, it was time to land. But where?

"I landed a little bit of a ways from where I would naturally land, and landed, so I was landing up-hill," Her-beck said. "My husband had come out and flagged me with a dishtowel."

Marguerite had landed that plane on only one wheel.

Luckily, a couple people were nearby and also saw the state Herbeck’s plane was in. They ran down the hill to help.

Herbeck said they held up the wing, so she could safely taxi the plane into the hanger.

"And she got out and she was the happiest lady… I never did tell her," Herbeck said after a slight pause.

In 1953, the couple was still flying, but Herbeck left teaching one-room schools and went right into "digging ditches," full time with her husband. They had started their excavating business, Marell Inc. in 1951.

Herbeck said they were one of only a couple companies in Vernon County that did soil testing and sewers.

"This was just past the (Great) Depression, where people would be able to add a water line or add a sewer line or something, so there was work to be done and we got into it," she said.

By the mid-1950s, Herbeck and her husband were ready to start a family. In 1955, a 6-year-old boy of one of the families in the Flying Farmers died when he ran into the propeller of a plane. Marguerite and Elgin decided they were done with flying.

They sold all their planes, and that same year, 1955, the Herbecks’ first child, Jack Sr., was born.

Through flying, farming, raising their three children and working side by side in their excavating business, she and her husband "were a pretty good team," Herbeck said.

Elgin died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1997.

The day after the funeral, Marguerite went back to work. She retired in 2002 at the age of 77.

Today, the Herbecks’ three children, Tanya, Scarlett and Jack Sr., and grandson, Jack Jr., run Marell Inc.

"That’s not my whole life story, but that’s pretty good," Marguerite said.

At 84 years young, she has a lot of life left to live.