[meteorite-list] Margaret Huss: From Her Earliest Day, Life Orbited Meteorites

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 17:41:59 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <200705150041.RAA15310_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

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

>From her earliest days, life orbited meteorites
By Virginia Culver
Denver Post
May 13, 2007

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.
Received on Mon 14 May 2007 08:41:59 PM PDT