Ex-nursing home manager loved to fish
4/9/2001BRYAN - Jeannette Musser, a longtime matron of the Hillside Nursing Home who cared for her mother and two husbands in her own home during long illnesses, died Saturday in the nursing home she had once managed.
She was 87 and suffered from Parkinson's disease and heart problems, her daughter-in-law, Norma Sidle, said. She had been a resident in the nursing home, now called Hillside Country Living, for about three years.
Mrs. Musser took a job as a cook at the nursing home when she was Mrs. Sidle. Her husband, Earl Sidle, suffered from emphysema and heart problems and could not work as a bricklayer for a long time before he died in 1963. He was in his 50s.
She then married Gordon Musser, a nursing home employee who became administrator of the longtime county home for the aged. They lived on the nursing home property on Williams County Road 16 in Jefferson Township which is between Bryan, Montpelier, and West Unity.
If an aide didn't show up for a night shift, she would stay up all night to work the job, her daughter-in-law said. If an employee couldn't get to work, she sometimes went out to pick the person up. She gave permanent waves to residents in the home's beauty parlor and continued to help in the kitchen when it was short of workers.
She always made time to prepare Sunday dinner for her immediate family - her husband, son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. That tradition continued after she and Mr. Musser retired from the nursing home in 1973 and moved to Coldwater Lake in Branch County, Mich.
She liked to fish and often served deep-fried fish that she had caught, french fries, and coleslaw. She enjoyed making pies and doughnuts as well. She once had worked in a restaurant in Toledo.
Mrs. Musser attended church services faithfully in Michigan and had been active in the Bryan Eagles Auxiliary. After her second husband died in 1982, she moved back to Williams County, where she lived on County Road K for about 10 years. Her only child, Bob Sidle, died in 1998.
She grew up in northwest Ohio as Jeannette Mixter, the oldest in a family of four children, and graduated from Montpelier High School in 1931.
Surviving are two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be at 2 p.m. tomorrow in Thompson Funeral Home in Montpelier. Visitation will start at noon.
The family suggests tributes to the Williams County heart fund.