[meteorite-list] Very Good Margaret and Glenn Huss Article

From: Mike Groetz <mpg444_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 12:52:16 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <827523.15570.qm_at_web32904.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5878113

  
a colorado life

>From her earliest days, life orbited meteorites
By Virginia Culver
Denver Post Staff Writer
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated:05/13/2007 01:07:16 AM MDT
 
Margaret Huss grew up around meteorites, so marrying
Glenn Huss was a good fit.

Margaret Huss and her husband operated the American
Meteorite Laboratory in Westminster for three decades
before she died April 14. She was 82.

The laboratory was originally in Arizona, where
Margaret Huss' father, H.H. Nininger, operated it as
the American Meteorite Museum.

Nininger "was a pioneer in the field," said Peggy
Schaller, the Husses' daughter, who lives in Denver.

Margaret Huss loved to hike and rock hunt and often
went out looking for petrified wood, dinosaur bones
and jade. When she was in her 60s she trekked to the
bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Glenn Huss made countless trips through farm states
looking for meteorites and asking farmers to look for
them, showing them samples and making trips back to
see farmers who had found meteorites, most often when
their farm machinery struck them.

He bought the meteorites from the farmers, some of
whom had no idea they were anything but rocks.

Margaret Huss helped her husband in the basement
laboratory, cataloging the rocks and keeping the
books.

Glenn Huss polished and cut the rocks, studying their
makeup and determining if they had undergone melting,
and trying to estimate their age. The meteorites were
kept in a vault for climate control, said another
daughter, Susan Greiner of Buena Vista.

Her dad usually sold the rocks to universities and
science labs.

Many of the meteorites that hit the Earth come from a
large belt of asteroids in orbit between Mars and
Jupiter, Greiner said.

In addition to meteorites and hiking, Margaret Huss
also wrote short stories, essays and children's
stories as well as poems and journals about her
travels. She filled her house with her own paintings
of landscapes.

Margaret Nininger was born in McPherson, Kan., on
March 28, 1925.

Her father was a biology professor at McPherson
College, and summers were spent in Palmer Lake, where
her parents ran a natural-history summer school.

One year she went on a year-long, college-sponsored
natural-history trek throughout the country, led by
her father.

The family traveled in a "house car," a "homemade RV"
in which they could all sleep, Greiner said.

Margaret Nininger graduated from East High School in
Denver and from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.,
with an English degree. She worked for MacMillan
Publishing Co. in New York City and later went to
Italy with a church agency after World War II to help
with the rebuilding effort.

While she was growing up, another teenager, Glenn Huss
of Haswell, had heard her father speak and he wrote
afterward to ask more questions about meteorites.

Years later, Glenn Huss and Margaret Nininger met
while both were working for the University of Denver
Press. They married on June 21, 1952. He died in 1991.


In addition to her daughters, Margaret Huss is
survived by her son, Gary Huss of Honolulu, and two
grandchildren.

Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at
303-954-1223 or vculver at denverpost.com
 





 
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Received on Mon 14 May 2007 03:52:16 PM PDT