A native of Cedarhurst, New York, one of the “Five Towns” located on the south shore of Long Island near JFK Airport, Marie grew up with a single focus career objective: journalist. This goal was reinforced by a meeting she arranged with the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter, Harrison Salisbury while she was in high school. A graduate of Lawrence High School, she was editor of the school yearbook her senior year.

Marie attended Ohio University and graduated in 1971 with a B.S. in journalism. Following graduation, she was hired by the Sandusky Register as a news reporter, initially assigned to the education beat. Within a year, she was reassigned to cover police and fire; she was the first female reporter in the history of the newspaper to cover police and fire operations.

In 1973, she was promoted to the City Hall beat covering Sandusky government, including the Sandusky City Commission. She wrote several investigative series, including one on slum housing in Sandusky, which won Ohio Newspaper Association awards. In 1975, she began writing a weekly column on city politics. Her column, called “On the Inside,” ran for five years and won several awards. In 1980, Marie left the Register to pursue a free lance writing career, which gave her the flexibility she needed with two young children at home. She specialized in economic development issues, including travel and tourism. She also worked part-time for the Cleveland Plain Dealer as the paper’s Erie County correspondent. For several years she wrote the region’s leading tourism publication, “Buckeye North.”

Marie entered politics as a player vs. an observer in 1989 when she ran successfully for trustee of Perkins Township, the suburban community located just south of Sandusky . She went on to serve three four- year terms as a trustee, a period of tremendous growth for the township. She served for two years as chairperson of the Erie Regional Planning Commission. Marie retired from public service in 2003.

Marie returned to journalism in 2005, recruited by the publisher of the Register to write a bi-weekly opinion column on “all things Erie County.” Her column ran for five years. A collection of her columns, titled According to Marie, was published in 2010. For seven seasons Marie worked part-time at Cedar Point as a makeup artist during the park’s Halloween event.

An avid gardener, Marie completed the training to become a certified Master Gardner by The Ohio State University Extension Service in 2000. She writes a bi-weekly column on gardening for the Register. In 2015, she co-authored with her husband, John, a history of tourism in the Lake Erie region. Lake Erie’s Shores and Islands is part of the “Images of America” series of books on local history published by Arcadia.