MONROE — For over six decades she was “everybody’s Swiss sweetheart” over the airwaves at WEKZ, where she hosted a Swiss folk music show that helped the many new immigrants from Switzerland feel at home in their adopted American town.

Even after she stopped spinning records, she continued to help blend the old world and the new — through Cheese Days and Turner Hall — reminding the town where they came from and helping forge a new identity. Now friends, family and townsfolk are mourning the loss of Martha Bernet, Monroe’s Swiss icon, a keeper of the flame of Swiss heritage here.

Bernet died last Friday after a short hospitalization, said her son Hans Bernet. She was 94.

“She was ready. She had a full life but you’re never really ready when the time comes,” said Bernet, reflecting on his mother’s rich legacy in the Swiss community she loved, telling everyone there was room in her heart for two homes — Monroe and in the Bern area of Switzerland. 

“She was an incredible and incomparable Swiss ambassador, entertainer, storyteller and friend,” said a statement posted by Turner Hall of Monroe. “A charter member of the Monroe Swiss singers, April 16 would have been her 95th birthday.”

She came to the U.S. for good with her husband Werner and his family in 1947. One of four children, she grew up in Leissigen, Bern, where she met her husband on a train where he had taken a job as a conductor. After a courtship, Martha returned to the U.S. in 1947, shortly after her Swiss wedding.

Werner’s family here had made limburger and Emmentaler cheese and also worked for a few years at a cheese operation in Juda. Eventually the family would purchase what is now the Suisse Haus and opened Bernet’s Sausage and Cheese shop in 1957. They sold the store in 1983.

She was also a founding member of the Monroe Swiss Club in 1952 and remained its oldest living member for years. In 1980 she and Werner served as the first Cheese Days King and Queen and served many roles at the event — another imprint of Swiss heritage on her corner of Wisconsin.

Her musical start was in the St. John’s Church choir but it wasn’t long before she was heard six days a week on WEKZ spinning records and talking in both languages, beginning with 78 records in those early years, right through to compact discs when she stopped doing new shows in 2016.

“I announce each piece in Swiss German and then translate…,” she told one of her many interviewers years ago. “At the close of each broadcast I sign off in Swiss German “that’s all for today.”

Hans Bernet said his mother’s radio show was heard for decades in barns and milking parlors across Green County and beyond. Some young Swiss children doing chores didn’t like the old music and yearned for more modern rock and country songs. But it was often much later in life, he said, that those same children became huge fans of her show and the link it gave them to their Swiss American childhoods. 

“They turn it on to remember,” he said.

Among Bernet’s proudest moments was being invited to perform at an event at the Smithsonian, said Hans. There she met Willard Scott, he said, “and taught him how to yodel live on national radio.”

Hans Bernet said a memorial service will be held for his mother in March. 

“I think my mother was the proudest of the fact that she managed to become an American while retaining and embracing her Swiss heritage,” he said. “And through her words and music taught others to do the same.”