Stanley Collins and Mary Herzogenrath

[00:01] STANLEY COLLINS: Good afternoon. I'm Stan Collins, age 69. Today's date is December 14, 2022, and we are in San Antonio, Texas. I'm here with my interview partner, Mary, my wife.

[00:14] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Good morning. Good afternoon. I guess it is afternoon. My name is Mary Herzogenrath, and I'm old enough to know better. And it's December 14, 2022. We are in San Antonio, Texas, and I'm here with my interview partner, my wonderful husband, Stan. Okay, so we're going to talk about how we met. So I came off of a long term relationship and needed something to help me get through the breakup. So I went back to church and found in the bulletin there an advertisement for a group about four people who are widowed, divorced, or separated. And I thought, this is what I need to do.

[01:06] STANLEY COLLINS: And that's very same thing with me. I had an 18 year marriage that surprised me at its dissolution. I came from a family that mom and dad were married for over 50 years. When my marriage fell apart after 18 and three sons, I was devastated, but I knew that there was life after. And so I don't know what motivated me, but I ended up going back to church. And it was at church that I saw in the bulletin an advertisement for this beginning experience. And at the time, I'm one of those kind of analytic a little bit. And I said, I'm not the first one to go through a divorce. There's got to be a way to figure out what went wrong so that I can move on and continue to live life. And so I was interested in what the beginning experience had to offer.

[02:01] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So I had gone to beginning experience, and it is a six week intro sessions and a weekend retreat, and then six weeks worth of follow up sessions. And when I finished that, I took a long trip, and I knew that they would ask me. I just had a feeling that they were going to ask me to be a facilitator when I got back. So I said yes, and went through the, helped facilitate the six weeks worth of intro. And then there was the weekend retreat up at mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden, Colorado. And that's where Stan and I met

[02:42] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah, I was at the time an airline pilot working for United Airlines, and I had relocated to Denver away from San Antonio, where my divorce occurred. And I was flying for United. And that was where I saw in the bulletin about this weekend retreat. And I said, hey, I can schedule that. And I scheduled myself not to be flying that weekend. And I went to this weekend retreat, and that's where our life together began.

[03:13] MARY HERZOGENRATH: We like to say that God shocked us back to him separately and then brought us together. So we went through the weekend retreat, and it is an intense debriefing, soul searching on what happened. And it starts on Friday night and ends on Sunday afternoon. And there's times when you are sent to your room to do some writing, and then they call you back to the group session. What happened during the group session?

[03:46] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, I was one of those individuals that's kind of lighthearted, and I like to interject humor into the whole thing. And I was doing that throughout most of the process here while they were educating us and taking us through the emotions of the. The lost relationship, which was, in my case, the divorce, the end of the marriage. And it wasn't until I had to write a letter and address those feelings directly. And then I was asked to talk about it in public, in public, which was my little group session, and I was not prepared for that. And as a pilot, you're supposed to be in control and do all that. And I just lost control of my emotions. And I had to leave that little session for a little bit, which caused a lot of consternation, apparently. And Mary heard about it as a facilitator. So one of the other facilitators, there was a barb, Barbara, and she was in charge of these little bells, which used to call us back to session, group session. One of the things I was doing is just to add a little bit of levity to the situation. She was responsible for it, and yet she. That set of bells, and yet every now and then she'd leave them unattended. Well, somehow they disappeared. And she was always frustrated trying to find them. And she said, of course I wouldn't fess up to it. I just sat there, was bemused until she was able to find him. And after, I don't know, several attempts, she was. Of losing her bells. I had to fess up, and I was dressed down for it. Yeah.

[05:39] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So we, Stan and I found ourselves walking over to the cafeteria for lunch, and we're just chitchatting and realized that we had a lot of the same viewpoints about the difference between God and religion. And it was just kind of okay. This person really understands me. As we were walking into the building where the cafeteria was, there was a wedding going on in the chapel there and there. As my thought to myself was, these people need to be going through this kind of a debriefing session after a loss, before you get married, to know what the ramifications can be. And make sure that their life has a. Their marriage has a happy story instead of one that's ending up causing a lot of angst.

[06:35] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, and that's one of the things that I took away from the beginning. Experience also was that education of, there should be no secrets. Don't let any. Any issue go unaddressed to allow it to fester. In the instance of my first marriage, we swept the differences in religion and faith under the carpet and didn't address it. And because we had that division, if you would, intolerance, things continued to fester. And then there was nothing that we could come back to. When I started, when I changed jobs from flying in the Air Force to flying at United, I was gone. And that just was the beginning of the end of the relationship.

[07:20] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So now we had our six weeks worth of follow up sessions, and it was a couple of days after the first one that Stan gave me a call, said, you know, I just kind of felt a little bit of a connection there, and was just wondering if you might be interested in going out. And I was absolutely shocked. Could not believe it. Was not looking for a companion of. And I just had to tell him, you know, I'm a facilitator and you're a participant, and we can't have, you know, any kind of a get together until after the six week follow up sessions.

[08:03] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, you don't realize how big a leap that was for me to even make that call. After the weekend retreat, and I was back in my apartment all by myself again. I'm sitting there saying, you know, man, I thought that was a connection. And I really enjoyed our talk. And I said, you know, there's got to be more to life than just being by myself like this. And I paced back and forth before I decided to call. I did. And so then when I called, and then you get the stiff arm, which says, no, we can't get together. You were a participant, so not to be put off, I said, okay, so what do I need to do? How long does this last? You know, it didn't make sense to me. And she said, well, there's a six week thing that I said, okay, fine. So, as a young second officer at the time on United, I didn't have very much control over my schedule. And I said, okay, I'll sign up for the six weeks. Well, with a weekly meeting, I think I only made three of them because of scheduling conflicts. I just couldn't make it. But pretty much at the end of the six weeks, I remember calling Mary again and saying, hey, okay, six weeks is over. What do you say?

[09:16] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And I said, sure, let's meet up and just go for a walk. So we took the walk from, oh, there was like a Bataan death march.

[09:29] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, I was trying to keep up.

[09:31] MARY HERZOGENRATH: With you and I was trying to keep up with you. And I had on sandals and you had on tennies and we were walking.

[09:36] STANLEY COLLINS: Along the Highline Canal in Denver, Colorado.

[09:39] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And you had just come off of 18 holes of golf.

[09:42] STANLEY COLLINS: Ooh.

[09:43] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Yeah. So you were already tired.

[09:45] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. And then, you know, I wasn't about to admit that I couldn't keep up with you. So I. I thought you were going real fast.

[09:52] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So then I thought he was going real fast. So here we are walking and talking and talking and walking and we're just walking all over the place. And walked across a park where they had just sprinkled, irrigated the grass and my sandals then got all wet and they were wearing blisters on my feet.

[10:13] STANLEY COLLINS: I don't even remember. Do you remember how long we walked?

[10:16] MARY HERZOGENRATH: I think we walked for an hour and a half.

[10:18] STANLEY COLLINS: Oh, man. But I mean, it just went by because we were chatting the whole time. It was wonderful.

[10:22] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Yeah.

[10:23] STANLEY COLLINS: And so that was the beginning.

[10:25] MARY HERZOGENRATH: That was the beginning. So we were getting to know each other and Stan told me that he had been stationed at O'Fallon Air Force Base, which is just on the east side of St. Louis.

[10:38] STANLEY COLLINS: Right. It was Scott Air Force Base.

[10:41] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Scott Air Force Base.

[10:42] STANLEY COLLINS: And I lived in O'Fallon, Illinois.

[10:43] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Oh, ok. Ok. So he was talking about taking his family waterskiing on the Mississippi river.

[10:53] STANLEY COLLINS: As I remember it, I said, we went water skiing on the Illinois river and it was up past Alton.

[11:00] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Past Alton.

[11:01] STANLEY COLLINS: That was the deep, the details that I remembered.

[11:04] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And my response was, no, I think it's the Mississippi river past Alton. And you said, no, no, I know.

[11:11] STANLEY COLLINS: It was the Illinois River. I just didn't remember the town further up from Alton.

[11:17] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Okay. So I said, it's the Mississippi. Do you want to make a bet on this?

[11:23] STANLEY COLLINS: And I said, yeah, I felt very confident that we were not on the Mississippi river. We were on the Illinois river. Okay, sure. I'll bet you. What's the bet?

[11:31] MARY HERZOGENRATH: The bet is ice cream.

[11:32] STANLEY COLLINS: Oh, no problem. They had nice little ice cream shops in and around Denver. No problem. I'm in for that. Let's go.

[11:38] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So this is before the age of texting back and forth. It was all emails. Stan went back to his apartment and looked it up and sure enough, the river above Alton is Mississippi.

[11:50] STANLEY COLLINS: Next to Alton is in Mississippi.

[11:52] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And the reason I knew that is because my mother was born in Alton, grew up in Grafton, and just was always talking about getting catfish out of the Mississippi river there in between Alton and Grafton. So I won the bet, whatever.

[12:08] STANLEY COLLINS: So, okay, so what kind of ice cream do you want?

[12:12] MARY HERZOGENRATH: I want. Now, remember, we're living in Denver and Stan's a pilot for United. I wanted my blue bell ice cream from Texas, which you couldn't get in Denver at the time.

[12:23] STANLEY COLLINS: So my solution to that was, okay, this means that once one of my trips, I have to make a visit to a store down in Texas, Heb, which is where we usually go shopping. And I need to get together with one of the managers and realize that this ice cream needs to be wrapped and frozen hard and everything. And then I have the one hop home from San Antonio to Denver, which is an hour and 45 minutes flight. And then I'll have that blue bell ice cream. And as I recall, you wanted your.

[12:56] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Favorite peaches and cream.

[12:58] STANLEY COLLINS: Peaches and cream. So it had to be a certain time of the year for that to be available.

[13:02] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So Mary's thinking, he's a pilot for United. I can get a trip to Texas to get my ice cream.

[13:09] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah, that never dawned on me. Typical guy. So, anyways, the bottom line of that story is when we finally got the ice cream to Mary, and it took several attempts, because.

[13:22] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Took almost a year.

[13:23] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah, yeah, okay, fine. When I finally got it home and presented the ice cream to Mary, it.

[13:32] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Was ice cream soup.

[13:33] STANLEY COLLINS: Soup. Yeah, I couldn't keep it cold. And that's the point where she finally fessed up. That says, well, I thought you'd be in a pilot, you'd take me there. Okay, well, why didn't you say that?

[13:44] MARY HERZOGENRATH: You know, so from then on, whenever we had a difference of whatever something was, I'd say, you want a bet?

[13:53] STANLEY COLLINS: I learned my lesson. No, no, no. And that wasn't the only time that I've lost bets to you.

[13:57] MARY HERZOGENRATH: No, but you won one.

[13:59] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, that's true. And we ended up going, and he.

[14:02] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Said he didn't want ice cream. He wanted frozen custard from Ted Drew's in St. Louis.

[14:08] STANLEY COLLINS: That's right.

[14:08] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Only place you can get two places.

[14:10] STANLEY COLLINS: That's right. Ted Drews is in St. Louis.

[14:13] MARY HERZOGENRATH: St. Louis. So at that point, we were married. So we went ahead and had a trip, a beautiful trip out to St. Louis. And I paid off my bet with Ted Drews custard.

[14:26] STANLEY COLLINS: And that's also the time that we went back up and looked at your family?

[14:30] MARY HERZOGENRATH: We found the graves up in Grafton. Yes. And we went to Permaquet Lodge, which is where my parents spent their honeymoon.

[14:38] STANLEY COLLINS: There you go.

[14:39] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So that was pretty cool.

[14:41] STANLEY COLLINS: Now, the other thing that I remember very vividly about our. Before we got married, both of us kind of agreed that we should go through marriage prep. We should make sure that we are going to be compatible and there aren't going to be any surprises. So one of the things that we did with a church that we belonged to was our lady of Fatima Parish in Lakewood.

[15:02] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And we went through marriage prep with Deacon Joe there.

[15:04] STANLEY COLLINS: Deacon Joe took us through marriage preponderance, and that was a good experience. Well, rewarding experience. And I didn't realize. I don't think you did at the time that we were being evaluated by Deacon Joe surreptitiously.

[15:20] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Deacon Joe has had his eye on us.

[15:22] STANLEY COLLINS: So he invited, in his surreptitious way, he invited us out to breakfast one.

[15:26] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Day after we were married. He said, can I take you to breakfast? Yeah, sure. So what he had in mind was he had started a food box ministry probably 15 years prior, and he was getting up in years and was looking for a. Someone or a couple to take over the reins of that.

[15:48] STANLEY COLLINS: He wanted to maintain the continuity and transfer that over.

[15:52] MARY HERZOGENRATH: He pulled us in hook, line and sinker.

[15:54] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. As it turned out, I think he and everyone else was kind of surprised that we worked well together. And this is. It occurs at Thanksgiving and Easter time, two different times. And through the course of our 14 years of managing that program, book, line and sinker, we ended up evolving it and carrying on the idea of continuity and getting more and more of the parishioners involved in little pieces of the activity. And it was so much of a joyous ministry to be involved in. There was one time, every session where we make up boxes and it's nice, easy work. We even had kids who had walking around two years old with a binky.

[16:40] MARY HERZOGENRATH: In their mouth, with their binky in the mouth, carrying the boxes.

[16:43] STANLEY COLLINS: And then we had seniors who was.

[16:47] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Oh, Lyle was 90 some odd years.

[16:49] STANLEY COLLINS: And we had the whole spectrum. And here they are, old, young, middle aged, working together in a joyous experience, even. Finally got our pastor involved, and he was there. And what a good thing that was for everybody to see the pastor roll up his sleeves and get involved.

[17:03] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Right, right.

[17:05] STANLEY COLLINS: Those were some good years.

[17:06] MARY HERZOGENRATH: It was wonderful years. So fast forward a few years. It's 911. And Stan, as he mentioned earlier, was a pilot for United. And at 07:00 in the morning he gets a phone call. I was on my way to work, and he gets a phone call from my son, and he says, are you awake? And he said, I'm just now getting out of bed, getting ready to go to work. And he said, go turn the tv on. And it was showing everything that was happening at 911. So what did you do?

[17:38] STANLEY COLLINS: In just typical fashion, I said, why? What's on? And he says, no, go turn on the tv. And then he hung up. That was it. So obviously you got to go turn on the tv. And as Mary said, I was getting ready to go fly that day, and obviously I was watching the live news coverage, and I was watching tv as the live coverage, as the second airplane hit the towers. And it's at that point that my military mind said, okay, this is not an accident. I thought the first one was, how can anybody make an accident? Because it was clear blue sky. I mean, how do you. That's. I was trying to rationalize that. Obviously there was no rationalization for these terrorist acts. Anyhow, when that second plane hit, I kind of knew that drove it home that this was an attack. And then I became very concerned and upset. My first concern was you because you were working at a law office up on which floor?

[18:39] MARY HERZOGENRATH: 24Th floor.

[18:40] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. And I'm sitting there saying, if this can happen in New York City, it can happen in Denver, and I'm worried about coming to get you. But first I got to make sure that I. What's going on? I had to call my captain and figure out what's going to happen. And he says, no, everything's been shut down. And it was something scatana is what's called. It's a clearing of all the skies under a national emergency. It's something I had trained from the time I was the first 1st pilot in the Air Force, and here I was living it, but I was not in the air, thank God. Anyway, so he said, nope, just be available by the phone and we'll see what's going to happen, but we're not going to fly today. I said, okay, fine. So then I got concerned about getting you out of that tall 23rd floor whatever it was. And so I drove, I called you, and I came down and they hadn't.

[19:40] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Closed the office yet. The managing partner came in and I had access to the intercom for the entire office and put out the message that, go home now. It's time to go home. So I called you and you came and picked me up.

[20:01] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. And not knowing what to expect. I mean, I loaded a bunch of rope in the back of the thing, the vehicle, and some leather gloves and stuff in case we needed to repel.

[20:11] MARY HERZOGENRATH: That, just in case. So, in the meantime, I had said, have you called your mom who lived in Oregon, your parents who lived in Oregon? He said, no. He said, it's not a problem. And I said, you need to call your mom and let her know you're okay. And he says, no, it's not a problem. So I picked up the phone, and I called his mother. And, of course, it was 2 hours earlier or later there, and so they hadn't even gotten up yet. And I said, are you watching tv? She said, no. I said, go turn the television on and know that Stan's home safe. And she thanked me profusely after that. Just that little bit of outreach to let them know that he was safe.

[20:56] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. One of the bad things about my reaction to it was that I chose not to contact anybody. And just. I sat there glued to the tv, like a lot of people, and just unbelievable images and imaginings. And obviously, I could understand what had happened inside those cockpits that resulted in a takeover of the airplane. And, of course, as more and more news was coming out, it was very disconcerting.

[21:28] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And he. I'm not. Wasn't the person that he needed to talk about this, to share this with. And I told him to call his good friend Stan went to the Air Force academy, one of his former roommates, and I said, talk to Scott about it. You've got to talk to somebody about it. I'm not the right person.

[21:49] STANLEY COLLINS: At the time, Scott was also an airline bomber.

[21:51] MARY HERZOGENRATH: He was an airline pilot as well, having flown for the air force for. Until retirement. And so they talked, and that helped a whole bunch for Stan's peace of mind.

[22:03] STANLEY COLLINS: You know, the other thing that helped, and I remember you suggested this, too, is I'm getting a leg cramp. I've got to have to stand up. Sorry, Terry. Anyways, what. What we did in you suggested to us, let's get away. And so from Denver, we ended up.

[22:23] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Friday, we went up to Grand Lake, and Stan didn't want to have any. Listen to any tv or radio or anything else. And one of my favorite pictures of Stan is him going into the lake at Grand Lake to go fishing with a big smile on his face. You couldn't. There was absolute silence in the air. You couldn't see any airplanes up there. You couldn't hear any airplanes up there. And I wanted to be glued to the tv to where I could see hear. See what was going on.

[23:00] STANLEY COLLINS: I think Colorado was the perfect place to be because, I mean, it's up in the mountains. It's beautiful, it's natural. And even though I wasn't catching anything, I was fishing. And that's therapeutic in itself.

[23:15] MARY HERZOGENRATH: It's called fishing, not catching. Right, exactly. Yeah.

[23:17] STANLEY COLLINS: But that was one of the best things we did. And coincidentally, I think that was the first time that we ended up going to Grand Lake together. And we discovered that they had a.

[23:29] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Little small, great restaurants up there.

[23:31] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, they had several of good little restaurants, but they also had that small theater.

[23:35] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Right. The theater up there, the little community theater. It's actually summer stock up there, and they do a great job.

[23:43] STANLEY COLLINS: So subsequently, we made it a point to go up there during the summer to see some place, right. And have a weekend getaway at a time.

[23:50] MARY HERZOGENRATH: So fast forward several years, a whole bunch of years we were living in Denver, and Stan's three boys live here in Texas, and my son was living in Boston at the time. And we just. Stan's oldest son ended up. They were married and were about to have a baby. And I had always said it would take an atom bomb to get me out of Denver because it's such a beautiful place to live. And all of a sudden, that atom bomb had a name on it, and his name was camden. So we decided to pull up ranks and move to Texas. I moved back home because I from here, and with all the boys, all three of them here in Texas, it was a great move. So we wanted to be close to them, but not too close. We didn't want to be on top of them. So we moved to a town 2 hours away and from san antonio, and it was also 2 hours away from all of my family in Houston. So it was perfect, except that it was 2 hours away.

[24:52] STANLEY COLLINS: We spent most of the time on the road. Yeah, 104 miles each way. We put on a lot of miles coming to see grandbabies.

[25:00] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Grandbabies. And so two and a half years later, we said, this is not working. Let's pull up ranks, take the loss, and move to San antonio. So we did. And at that point, there were two grandbabies in San antonio. Two sons had had children.

[25:19] STANLEY COLLINS: Right? So the move also put us arriving in san Antonio as they were shutting down a whole bunch of the state as far as Covid.

[25:28] MARY HERZOGENRATH: March 18, 2020. They were shutting the doors.

[25:31] STANLEY COLLINS: There you go. But we were able to get the move accomplished, and the movers unloaded us in one day.

[25:38] MARY HERZOGENRATH: In one day.

[25:38] STANLEY COLLINS: And we had a house full of boxes and everything. And yet then the need came five days later.

[25:46] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Can you take care of Camden, the two and a half year old? Because his school closed.

[25:50] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. For Covid. And so. Sure, bring him over. So here we are trying to unload from boxes and we got this. What was he? Two and a half.

[25:57] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Two and a half, yeah.

[25:59] STANLEY COLLINS: Running around and we're taking care of. And it was a. It was a great time. And we fixed up boxes for him to have little forts with and investigate. And then we had a lot of paper, wrapping paper that he could do artwork on with coloring and such.

[26:12] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And he played hide and seek around all the boxes. And when he took a nap, Grammy and Grampy went down for a nap as well.

[26:19] STANLEY COLLINS: Bottom line, you know, when the kids sleeping usually, anyways, that was a good time. And now, of course, everybody, well, they've continued to have children. Children. And so we are now up to seven.

[26:32] MARY HERZOGENRATH: We just had number seven.

[26:34] STANLEY COLLINS: Number eight will be.

[26:35] MARY HERZOGENRATH: And number eight will be here in March.

[26:37] STANLEY COLLINS: And the oldest one is not yet six years old.

[26:39] MARY HERZOGENRATH: The oldest one is not yet six years old. So we will have eight under the age of six.

[26:44] STANLEY COLLINS: And they get along well. In fact, this past weekend, we had them over to the house for the annual five of them ginger. Well, that's true. Five of the seven gingerbread making cookies. And of course, our kitchen is set up perfect for that. And we have some video and some pictures of it. And a couple of the girls were sneaking and eating the.

[27:06] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Eating the dough before it was cooked.

[27:09] STANLEY COLLINS: Flour over their face and everything but smiles. And they get along real well. And so what I did is I asked for volunteers, who wants to donate some cookies? And we made up a plate and we took it next door to Ken and his wife, Betty, who has, for.

[27:26] MARY HERZOGENRATH: The last year and a half, advanced dementia.

[27:28] STANLEY COLLINS: Advanced Alzheimer's is what it is. And so it just so happened that they were getting home from him, having her in an outing. And so here we all dressed up with our little ears and antlers.

[27:42] MARY HERZOGENRATH: They had headbands on Christmas headbands.

[27:44] STANLEY COLLINS: And we showed up at his place with a bunch of cookies and presented him with some Christmas cookies. And, of course, it was an opportunity for Betty to have something other than just the doe drab of her daily existence. But the kids loved it. Got back into the house and the kids played for the rest of the afternoon.

[28:05] MARY HERZOGENRATH: What's fun is we have a kind of a circular pattern between our kitchen and our den. And the kids are running, chasing each other all around with us standing there trying to clean up from the cookies, and they're chasing each other and they're just having a blast doing it. You just have to move out of the way while they come barreling through.

[28:27] STANLEY COLLINS: Part of that was they're burning off the sugar from the.

[28:29] MARY HERZOGENRATH: This is true. Who fed them sugar?

[28:31] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah. They also went outside. Let's play rocks. And so got this little red wagon out there, and they like to take some of the.

[28:39] MARY HERZOGENRATH: We have a lot of rocks as part of the landscape out there. They love going outside and playing rocks. Are you kidding me?

[28:45] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah.

[28:46] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Really.

[28:46] STANLEY COLLINS: Just the simple toys, you know? Anyhow, we have some pictures of that, too. And while we were over giving cookies to the neighbor Ken, I had the kids out, and Mary enlisted my sons.

[29:01] MARY HERZOGENRATH: To populate the stockings with elves on.

[29:05] STANLEY COLLINS: The mantel with a whole bunch of stuff. And the thing that was sticking out the top of these little elves.

[29:11] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Elves. So it was their heads and their arms with their eyes and their.

[29:14] STANLEY COLLINS: So when we got back in, grins there with the kids. Oh, look at this. And it was.

[29:19] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Sid has been here.

[29:20] STANLEY COLLINS: Exactly. And they got excited and who cares? I mean, these elves.

[29:25] MARY HERZOGENRATH: But that was the big, that was the big thing. They all just went crazy over those silly elves. What is it about the elves anyway? I don't get it.

[29:35] STANLEY COLLINS: Anyway, so, so we're having a good time living the life with, with kids and grandkids, and it's, it's nice to be able to, to help out when we need to or to go to a little piano recital.

[29:48] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Piano recital last week.

[29:49] STANLEY COLLINS: There you go.

[29:50] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Right. So anyway.

[29:54] STANLEY COLLINS: Yeah.

[29:57] MARY HERZOGENRATH: I want to say goodbye, dear. This has been fun doing this with you. Thank you.

[30:03] STANLEY COLLINS: Well, merry Christmas. And thank you for the last 21 years of marriage. Bliss.

[30:12] MARY HERZOGENRATH: Yes.

[30:13] STANLEY COLLINS: I love you.

[30:14] MARY HERZOGENRATH: I love.