Margaret Collings Muster

as told to Wanda,

Cathy and Steve

28 November 2006

  I was born July 7, 1923 in Fish Haven, near Bear Lake, Idaho.

  My mother was Olive Pearl DeRenzy, she was married to Simpson Lyman Collings at Pocatello, Idaho on October 20th, 1920.  I was preceded by a brother who only lived 8 or 9 hours and didn't receive a name.  His headstone identifies him as "Infant Collings."  My father was a veteran of World War I, but never talked about it.  While he was in the military he came down with tuberculosis and they operated on him; he had a big scar on I think his left shoulder.  He worked for Utah Power & Light, right there on Bear Lake, and he also used to run a pleasure boat on Bear Lake.

  I have a brother and sister, William Howard Collings, born February 26, 1925 at Camp Lifton, a complex of Utah Power & Light small employee residences near the UP&L substation.  At the UP&L power plant they would generate electricity from Bear Lake.  I remember I could look into the water from the catwalks and see fish swimming in the current.

  I wasn't around my Collings grandparents a whole lot.  I stayed with them when they took a trip to Yellowstone Park.  They lived in a log cabin that isn't there any longer.  The flower beds are also gone.

  Sometime between 1929 and 1930 my family moved from Bear Lake to New York.  Sim (Simpson) Rich went with us to New York.  Sim was my dad's cousin.  His mother was a sister to Grandpa, I think.  Her name was Deseret Collings, she was one of the wives of John Rich.  We drove across the country.  Dad said he was going so far away it'd take a five-cent postcard to hear from him.

  Elizabeth May (Betty) was born May 18, 1931 in Cortland, Cortland County, New York. 

  When I was about 4 years old my brother Bill and I took a train with our mother to Monmouth, Warren County, Illinois for the funeral of Margaret S. Miller, wife of John Miller, my great-grandmother.  She was born in Germany. 

  When I was 4 or 5 years old I would dress our cat up in people clothes.

  The DeRenzys were Heugonauts from Albania.  One of my ancestors was with the Turks as they fought their way into Germany.  He settled in Cullin, Germany.  Sir Matthew was born in 1575 in Germany and went to Ireland in sixteen-hundred and something.  In 1623 I think he was knighted and the records are found in Burke's Peerage.  My mother heard from a lady in New Zealand but she decided we weren't related because that family's name was spelled DeRenzie.  My mother's father's side of the family had the name DeRenzy.

  Grandpa and Grandma DeRenzy lived not over 1/2 mile from us on Merrill's Creek, near Marathon, New York.  They moved there from Illinois after we did.  They sold the farm when Grandpa could no longer work it, and moved to Binghamton, New York.

  My father looked around for a few days and bought a dairy farm east of Marathon, on Merrill's Creek about 2 or 3 miles out of Marathon.  It was somewhere around 100 acres.  It had a house, a barn, some kind of shed, and an outdoor privy.  Because of the Depression they had consolidated the schools and we were hauled by bus to a one-room schoolhouse.  Going to school at Marathon was enjoyable.  In the wintertime the buses couldn't get through, so Dad put a cover over the sleigh and took us to the main road where we could catch the bus.  When school was out he would be there waiting for us and take us home.  He also drove school bus for a good many years. 

  We had a theater in Marathon where we would go and watch movies.  There was always a parade in town for the Fourth of July.  In the winter when we shoveled snow we would throw snowballs at each other.  I also remember we made fruit pies and all kinds of candy.  We would make chocolate covered cherries, peanut brittle, taffy.  We also made apple cider, which would quickly turn to vinegar.

  In about February or March of each year we would tap the trees in the sugar bush; we had a sugar house where we cooked the sap to make maple syrup.  The sap was sickeningly sweet.

  My father was a Mason, and my mother was in Eastern Star.  They used to go to meetings and also the the big dinners they held.  He died in August 1968 of a heart attack in a nursing home in Salt Lake City.  My mother died in a car accident in March 1968 in Phoenix Arizona.

  My brother Bill served in Germany during World War II.  After the war he went to school and was a troubleshooter for General Motors.  He lived in Denver.  After his wife Alice died (of tuberculosis?), he married Elsie Kelley and they now live in Easton, Maryland.  Bill has two daughters, Dianne and Karen.  Dianne is an executive in a bank in Denver.  Karen had 3 girls, one of them is an architect.

  My sister Betty married Irving Jones and many years later, Kenneth W. Prater.  She didn't have any children.  She lives in Yuma, Arizona.  Her home phone is (928) 726-1546.  Her email address is kwp_2@juno.com.

  Dad had another cousin, Horsely Spencer who was a missionary who was serving a mission in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.  Horsely and other missionaries often hitchhiked up to Marathon to visit.  They'd stay several weeks, then go back.  One time my father and them went up to Cortland to tract and they were kicked out of town.

  On the farm we raised grain and corn to feed the cows.  In the fall of the year we'd harvest the grain and the thrashers would come and thrash the grain and it would be chopped, bagged and stored in the barn.  The corn was cut and put in the silos to feed the cows in the wintertime.

  In 1935 lightning struck our barn and burned it to the ground.  Daddy probably had it covered by insurance, because he built another barn to replace it.

  Sometime later we moved into Marathon.  We lived at 14 Front Street in a great big house.  Dad bought the Shell service station and ran that until 1942 or 43 when he sold out.  He also sold Oldsmobiles from our driveway at home.  Dad drove out to Utah in 1935 to his parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary.  He brought his whole family with him. 

  We went back out again in 1939.  I brought my girlfriend Mary Birdable with me.  At that time my brother Bill broke his arm when he fell off a bandstand at a family reunion.  On the way back to New York we visited Yellowstone National Park.

  In the winters in Marathon we used to go ice skating on the Tioughnioga River, which ran right there in front of our house.  We had a street light right there on the river bank.  We'd put on our snowsuits and skates in the house, then cross the road and go skating, right there by the bridge. 

  In 1942 they had just opened up a branch of the LDS Church in Binghamton.  I was baptized I think August 21st, 1942 in the Susquehanna River.  The river was clear and cold.  I was 18 years old.  A few weeks later I went to Utah with the daughter of our branch president, Vivian Snow. 

  I enrolled in the LDS Business College, specializing in business, bookkeeping.  I worked as a bookkeeper for the Bamberger Railroad for a short time.  In June of 1943 Bill graduated from high school in Marathon and went into the army.  I returned to Marathon and went to work in the feed store until Christmas of 1943. 

  One of my customers was John Muster.  He called me up and asked me to go out.  He reminded me that I knew his brother Ernie, who had already gone into the Marines.

  John was a handsome man, and hardworking.  He would work all day and truck cabbage to the sauerkraut factory at night.  He would haul coal from Wilkesbarre Pennsylvania to Cortland.  When he would come to our home he would talk to Dad.  He would sometimes take me to a movie.

  When I was a child, until the church in Binghamton started in about 1942, my parents weren't active in the LDS Church.  My father never became active until after they moved to Utah, then Arizona.  My mother didn't join the LDS Church until maybe 1955.

  John and I were married 27th February 1944.  After we were married we lived on the Muster Farm for awhile.  Grandma Muster was friendly, but she couldn't speak much English.  The Musters were from Weidli, near Lausen, Switzerland.  At various times we lived near Marathon, eventually Killiwog until 1950.  We bought a dairy farm in Killawog, lived there for a few years.  In the winter of 1950 we sold out, had an auction, and went to St. Petersburg Florida for 6 months.  John worked at a radiator shop.

  After about 6 months we went to Sharon Hill, near Philadephia, Pennsylvania, and John worked at Westinghouse.

  In December 1951 we moved to North Carolina.  John saw an ad in a farm paper for a herdsman, he came down and the guy hired him, then he went back up and brought his family to live in Raleigh.  We were down here a week and the guy died.  We stayed on the dairy and worked until the man's wife sold it to North Carolina State University, then we moved to another farm above where Lake Wheeler is now, and John began raising chickens. 

  In 1956 we moved to the corner of Ray and Lynn Road, where he rented a farm and continued to raise chickens.  In 1961 the feed mill on the chicken farm burned down.  John built 3 big chicken houses.  He changed the middle chicken house into hog pens, then he went to the coast, bought a hundred piglets, brought them back, and fed them for 6 weeks.  By then they each weighed 240 pounds.  He would take them to the market and sell them.  He always got top price for them.

  He would mix his own feed from corn, lime, and fish meal, meat meal, and vitamins.  He made his own meal using different formulas for both pigs and chickens.

  We washed and graded all of our own eggs.  We had two egg vending machines where people could buy up and buy eggs at any time of the day or night, a dozen at a time.  One of these was converted from a Coca Cola machine.

  All 4 kids were born in Cortland.  Cathy was named after her grandmother Muster.  Wanda was named after my cousin.  My sister Betty's full name is Elizabeth Mae.  When Wanda was born she was blonde as blonde can be, and she had tight, tight curls [we were shown a picture of her at maybe 2 or 3].  Johnny was named after his father, with his middle name Wayne after my cousin.  Bill is named after his uncle Bill, with his middle name Claire after a friend of ours.  When each of you were born your dad would drop me off at the hospital and then go home.  Bill came breach.

  I worked for Long Meadow Dairy for ten years, starting in 1952, working as a bookkeeper.  I worked at home on the farm until 1980, then took a job as a salesperson for JC Penney.  I worked at Penney's for 11-1/2 years. 

  For pets the kids had cats and dogs, Wanda had a pig.  I don't know what happened to the pig.

  When John got sick in 1973 we had to sell out.  He was having hardening of the arteries and trouble with his heart.  He also suffered from depression.  He would get moody.  I'd ask him a question and he wouldn't answer, even if I knew he knew the answer.  John wouldn't do anything when he was depressed.  He'd get up and eat breakfast, then he would sit for awhile, then he'd go back to bed. 

  The doctor told him he had to give up heavy work.  He stayed in bed.  We came here, I started tilling the ground, starting out with a small garden.  He did a lot of health reading.  he learned to take raw vegetables, vitamins, plus the medicine the doctors gave him.He took an interest and took over the gardening.  We went to New York and bought a TroyBuilt tiller. 

  After I started working at Penney's he'd wake me up to take him for a ride.  One day he disappeared.  The police found him on the entrance to Highway 1 going the wrong way.  He'd gone to see a friend of his, got confused, and couldn't find his way back.

  John loved to go out to the airport and watch the planes landing and taking off.  He was in and out of hospitals the last couple of years of his life.   The last year of his life he was on oxygen.  The night before he died as the nurses were trying to change the needle in his hand, he asked me "How much longer?"  I thought he was wondering about the nurses.  When I saw how he was doing the next morning I knew he wasn't going to last much longer.  He died of congestive heart failure at 8:30 am, 2 May 1988. 

  In 1978 I started working at the genealogy center doing research and helping others do it.  I'm a member of the Civil War Veterans.  My great grandpa Daniel DeRenzy was in the Illinois Infantry during the Civil War.  I go to rehab twice a week.  I go to Vicky Myer's house for LDS General Conference.  Vicky takes me to the Farmer's Market, and to the Tea Room in Wake Forest for lunch.  We go to plays and musicals.  I still work in the flower beds.  I also make dish cloths and tie quilts.

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