Martins celebrate 75 years of marriage

Getting ready for an interview for the Custer Community Church, Wayne Martin quickly gets his visitor a cup of coffee, complete with daughter Vikki’s banana bread.
With a home adjacent to the Martin home on Lower French Creek Rd, Vikki is a significant caregiver for her parents, Wayne and Gertrude, a couple who will celebrate 75 years of marriage this year.
Wayne was born May 9, 1926, at Eagle Butte, soon to celebrate his 97th birthday.  He and his wife Gertrude have many stories of living a life on the Dakota Prairie.
“My mother was only 15 when she had the first of eight children,” he said. “Before I was even in the first grade, I was doing work for a man, like milking cows. Our Great Western Wheat Grass was the best pasture for our cattle that we raised six miles south of Eagle Butte.”
His dad, a homesteader, also had a job with the railroad that involved coal supply for the trains.
“When my dad died at age 54, our draft board said, ‘Wayne, you stay at home and take care of your family,’” Wayne said. “The Army took my 20-year-old brother instead. I was only 18 and had to work morning to night with doing all the needed chores.  We had no tractors. We made a dry fuel out of cow manure. I had only an eighth-grade education because I was needed on the ranch.
“Winters could be brutal.  The worst were in 1949 and 1966. Some of our roads would have snow drifts 20-feet tall. It seems that I was always mowing hay, pitching hay, herding cattle, feeding cattle.  The work never stopped.”
A very difficult home life was caused by Wayne’s mother finding a second husband who was an alcoholic, causing bitter memories for the family.
“We had to go to the creek for water—down a steep hill—and then back up the hill,” Wayne said.  
Wayne’s mother made her own soap and washed their clothes with a washboard in that same creek.  She was always canning pork, beef and the garden vegetables.
With no road maintenance, the gumbo soil made travel a challenge. If a car would become stuck in the gumbo, the mud would trap the car.  They would have to jack up the car and somehow push that mud aside.
The reservation was across the Moreau River, and friends were made on both sides of the river.
When Wayne was 15 he was sick for a week, leaned over, heard a pop, and luckily caught a ride in the back of a Model A Ford pickup with a neighbor driving to Eagle Butte.  Yes, he had a ruptured appendix. The doctor there told him that he would have to go to Pierre for surgery.
His father was the one to drive their 1926 Chevy the 95 miles to Pierre on rough roads, arriving at Pierre’s only doctor’s office at 9  p.m.
And that nurse said, “The doctor has had a hard day. Come back in the morning.”
Wayne ended up with 15 days in the Pierre hospital.  He says, “Yes.  I just about didn’t make it.”
Meeting Gertrude at a dance, he says, “I saw her walking and asked her, ‘What’s your name?’ And she said, ‘Gertrude.’ And I could say, ‘That’s a good name. My mother’s name is Gertrude.’”
Married Sept. 19, 1948, this year they will celebrate a 75th anniversary.
Their honeymoon was a trip to the Black Hills, and they decided then that they would want to eventually retire there. The couple moved to Custer in 2001.
Wayne offers this advice: “Stay healthy. Be eating a lot of butter, pork, beef and chicken. Never drink or smoke. Don’t spend your life in a bar.  And, now, be careful about talking politics!”
Gertrude was born June 19, 1929, at Eagle Butte.  She weighed only two and a half pounds at birth, but she remained a healthy child.
Her grandfather had been a homesteader five miles north of Eagle Butte.  When she was 12, her family moved to California at the beginning of WWII.  Jobs were plentiful then because of the airplane industry’s war effort where her father was hired.
When the returning servicemen came back to their promised jobs in 1945-46, the family moved back to Eagle Butte.
“We had lived in California for five exciting years, only 10 miles from Hollywood,” Gertrude said. “We loved that world of movie-making.  After the War, we could even take trips with a ferry to tour the South Dakota Battleship. We kids were not happy about our father’s idea of returning to the ranch.”
In 1946 they again worked their family’s land with relatives. Her dad had a job working for a WPA project of building Brueschke Lake, where she would later go ice skating.
“I never met Wayne until we came back for senior year at Eagle Butte High School.  We lived five miles north of town; Wayne’s family lived six miles south of town,” Gertrude said.
After high school she worked at Pierre for the Department of Motor Vehicles. She also worked many years for the state bank at Eagle Butte.
The couple would have four children: Vikki, Gary, Dale and Debbie, and now they also have five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Ranch life was difficult.  
“We worked all the time.  And, many times I had to use a hoe to kill rattlesnakes near the house,” she said. “With 200 to 400 registered Shorthorns and Angus, it seemed we were always on the ranch.”
Her health had a downturn four years ago when three strokes hurt her balance.  She fell, causing extensive broken bones, forcing her to stay at assisted living homes several times.
Enjoying their home near Custer, Gertrude says, “We soon will have a 75th wedding anniversary. My advice to all is to work with your husband and concentrate on your children for a happy marriage.”
Wayne adds, “We say, ‘For better or worse.’ It’s a promise. And, we should keep that promise.”
—Submitted by
Lois Wells

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