About the Authors
Margaret “Margie” Hopper Feitt
Margie Feitt
Early in 1930, Margie’s maternal grandparents Stewart and Melva (Greenfield) Ward, and their 10-year-old daughter (Margie’s mother Mary Jeanne Ward) were transferred from Ohio to Rennerdale for Stew’s job. He was an “Enumerator” with the railroad and was told they “needed a man in their Pittsburgh office.”
Before he left for World War II, her mother married H.A. Hopper Jr. of Oakdale, PA. Margie was born in 1947 and grew up in Rennerdale. About 12 or so kids Margie’s age played and grew up together.
If growing up in Rennerdale during the 1950s and 1960s had a title, it would be “Free to Be Me.” Kids were only in the house if they had chores to do. Between the woods, Little Rock and Big Rock, the pond, and Fossils Cliff, there were just not enough hours in the day to play. Even dinner with her family was negotiable if a friend invited her over. Summer evening sleepovers were the norm – mostly outdoors on the front or back porches and sometimes in the tent if her dad put it up.
After graduation from Chartiers Valley High School, Margie attended Kent State University and Duff’s Business Institute. She married and became the mother of three children (Kerry, Ted, and Gretchen) and grandmother of eight grandchildren (four boys and four girls).
In 1972 she and her family couldn’t afford to buy a house in Rennerdale. It took 26 years for fate to intervene and allow her to reside once again in Rennerdale. She’s lived at 24 Suburban for nearly 24 years now (right around the corner from the house she grew up in), living proof that “Yes, Margaret – you can go home again.”
Douglas “Doug” MCLaren
Doug McLaren
Doug McLaren is a former resident of Rennerdale but still remembers growing up in “my hometown” even after being gone so many years. Doug and his brother, Craig, were born at the beginning of the “baby boomers” generation to the parents of James William “Bill” and Martha R. “Pat” McLaren, early residents (1938) of the growing community of Rennerdale.
Doug spent his first eighteen years living on Suburban Avenue. When old enough to go by himself, Doug went “down to” the pond and ball field. Going to the store and the church were referred to as “heading over” to those two locations. Doug attended the Rennerdale grade school was simply called “going to school” with the lack of compass direction inferred. Life seemed so simple then. Transitioning to junior and senior high school happened simultaneously with the new Chartiers Valley school system opening, and Doug was in the first 8th-grade class in a new school.
College life took him down US Route 19 (Interstate 79 did not exist) to West Virginia University in Morgantown, where he majored in forestry. Summers meant coming back to Rennerdale, his “sense of place.” After college, a job opportunity took Doug to Kentucky for a professional career and then retirement.
In the spring of 2020, Doug was introduced to Rand Gee’s books about Collier Township places and folks. Doug was attracted to the first organized township history because the books reintroduced him to where he grew up. Exchanging just a few emails with friends encouraged Doug to become a contributor to “Memories of Collier Township.”
Participating in the Rennerdale history research led Doug to co-author “Remembering Rennerdale.” This book’s design and contributions provide a unique way to describe those that “lived the good life” in Rennerdale and a way to understand this century-old but very vital community found in the shadows of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Doug reflects by saying, “For the folks that grew up in Rennerdale or now live there,” Remembering Rennerdale” describes in a very unique way, through word and picture, why the residents of Rennerdale, past and present, near or far, fondly enjoy retelling the stories that unite them.”
Kathleen Cochran Zimbicki
Kathleen Zimbicki
The house Kathleen May Cochran was born in, with a wide front porch and corner tower still stands on Fairview Street on a hill overlooking Midway, the town that lies halfway between Pittsburgh and Steubenville -- midpoint on the Panhandle Route of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her father, Garvin Cochran, an engineer on that now-defunct line, was the son and grandson of Scottish immigrants; her mother was Sadie May Harris Cochran, and her family came from England.
Kathleen, the fourth of five children in their musical household, performed with her father and siblings as The Cochran Family Singers and nurtured her talent for art on the side. After high school, she worked in a Pittsburgh office and became engaged to marry a Presbyterian minister. Then her eldest brother brought home kind, sturdy, handsome Mike Zimbicki, his friend from the steel mill, and he and Kathleen married five months later. In 1957, with their second child on the way, they moved from her parents’ house to a cottage in Rennerdale. In the 1960s, Kathleen’s abilities as an artist grew up alongside her four children. She began taking classes at Chatham College and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts with painter Henry Koerner, who influenced her magic realism style.
In 1976, she opened Studio Z on Route 60, later moving it to the South Side, where it thrived for 27 years as both studio and gallery. Kathleen became a leader and beloved matriarch of Pittsburgh’s art community, hosting exhibits and serving as president of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Society of Artists. Her watercolors have appeared in 40 exhibitions in 11 countries. Dance critics called the 20 costumes she designed for a 1986 Pittsburgh Ballet Theater production “stunning” and “stylish.” World traveler, skydiver, grandmother, and great-grandmother, the gregarious KZ survived pandemic lock-down by becoming a hometown house painter of over 200 in Rennerdale and dozens more, including the cherished one with the tower on the hill overlooking Midway. (Written by Pat Lowry)
Stop by Kathleen’s website to view her watercolors: Google “Kathleen Zimbicki,” or http://www.kathleenzimbicki.com/