For 15 years, Office Manager Ronnie Monaco’s calm voice and steady demeanor has been a dependable constant at The Lincoln County News.
Now, she’s announced her well-earned retirement on May 31, 2022, and Kendra Johnson has returned to begin training for the office manager role.
“Ronnie has been a wonderful person to work with,” Lincoln County News Editor Brian Blansett said. “She’s calm, resourceful, efficient and dedicated—everything you want in an office manager. And she’s just a really good person.”
Monaco started working part-time as a typeset ter at The Lincoln County News in February 2007, shortly after moving back to Oklahoma from Montana, where she had been working for Citizen State Bank.
Her husband, Cary Monaco, is the pastor at Liberty Baptist Church, in Chandler, Okla., a church that they planted in November 2007, shortly after she started at the paper.
At that time, The Lincoln County News, Stroud American, and Tri-County Herald were separate publications under different ownership.
She eventually shifted to the role of production assistant.
Then in 2019, Brett Wesner bought The Lincoln County News, and a short while later, he also purchased Stroud American and Tri-County Herald from Brian Blansett, retaining Blansett as the editor.
The same year, Monaco was promoted to working full-time as the paper’s office manager, handling everything from cash sheets to legal notices; obituaries to public records, and helping the three publications combine into one in March 2020.
“She was the glue that kept everything together and working smoothly during the change of ownership a couple of years ago,” Blansett said. “I can’t imagine how we could have merged operations of three newspapers without her.”
Monaco said she enjoys “the sense of accomplishment of completing a paper every week and seeing the finished product.”
She’s looking forward to the flexibility that retiring will offer her, she said.
“We feel like it’s God’s leading in our lives,” Monaco said. “It’s time for me to stay home and take care of things at home and whatever I need to do to help with the ministry there.”
The legacy of professionalism that she leaves behind is immense.
“To say we’ll miss her is the understatement of the decade,” Blansett said.
For the next month and a half leading up to her retirement, Monaco will have an additional responsibility—training the future office manager, Kendra Johnson.
“I’m happy and delighted Kendra is rejoining us,” Blansett said. “She did terrific work during her internship and when she filled in during Ronnie’s vacation last summer. She’s organized, creative and talented.”
Johnson interned at The Lincoln County News through the Oklahoma Newspaper Foundation in the summer of 2020, and was invited back as a parttime staff writer in late December of that year.
In May 2021, she graduated from Oklahoma Baptist University with a B.A. in Theatre, Summa Cum Laude, where she worked on the student newspaper staff.
She accepted a fulltime journalist position at Countywide & Sun in Aug. 2021, handling a range of responsibilities that included reporting on city meetings, shooting sports photos and handling legal notices and obituaries.
“I’ve slept better the last couple of months, knowing that she would be filling Ronnie’s position,” Blansett said.