Sbperkins: February 2008

Gretta Belle Staley was born on February 14, 1885, in Tiffin, OH, the daughter of Joshua Clayton Staley and Alice Edith Loose (that’s a long o). Her father owned a drayage business. She had two brothers, Ellsworth Greg, born August 3, 1883, and Roial Clayton, born July 4, 1886. She remembered them teasing her the year she questioned Santa Claus by putting soap and coal on her plate instead of the usual fruit and candy.

Gretta and Ells, 1885

Alice and Clayt in front

Roial, Gretta, and Ellsworth in back

Gretta's first job was in a ladies’ clothing store. When she went to Michigan one summer to visit relatives, she attended the Eaton County fair, where she met Ernest Hiram Martin. They were married on 12 March, 1907, in Tiffin. For their honeymoon, they took the train to the big city of Akron, OH. They moved in with Ernest’s parents’ on Royston Rd. between Eaton Rapids and Charlotte, MI, and began building a small home on the same property south of the homestead. Their first child, Doris, was born on December 7, 1907, just after they moved in. Gretta remembered lying in bed in the new house with the new baby, watching the plaster dry. Donna was born on 1 September, 1915.

Probably in 1919, they bought a lot and built a larger home on a hill a couple miles south on the same road . On November 11, 1919, after Ernest, Gretta, and Donna had been to Lansing for the day, the home burned to the ground. Donna remembers her dad and the man across the street moving the piano out of the house to save it, and 7 men moving it back in after it was rebuilt. All the harvest of cabbage, apples, and potatoes, which had been stored in the basement, was well-cooked, and had to be shoveled out and fed to the animals. Donna’s doll and wicker buggy were also saved, although the buggy suffered a burn hole. While the family rebuilt on the same foundation, the across-the-street neighbors moved to town (he was a barber in Eaton Rapids), and the Martins moved in to their house, keeping the two children so they could attend the country school down the road.

The Martins also lived through a tornado, which destroyed their barn in 1929 or 1930. A few years later, while Donna was in college, Ernest and Gretta were returning home from a visit to family in Kalamazoo, and were in a head-on car accident. Gretta broke her pelvis and spent several months in a full-length cast with a stabilizer bar between the feet. From that she recovered fairly well, but after a fall in Carter’s Market in the late 1950s (she caught the strap of her boot on a display)which caused another broken bone, she had difficulty getting around.

When Hubert was drafted into World War II, Ernest and Gretta sold their farm and moved in with Donna and Mary, who had recently moved to Battle Creek. Ernest got a custodial job with the Battle Creek Public Schools, and Gretta babysat, while Donna worked at the dairy and ice cream bar across the street. Sometimes in the afternoon Gretta would send Mary over to pick up a treat. Her favorite was a pineapple sundae. After the war they stayed a few years in Battle Creek, then purchased a home in Charlotte, where Ernest worked at the Armory. Not long after, they moved to a 40-acre farm on Packard Highway. In the 1960s they moved to Crane St. in Eaton Rapids. By then, Grandma spent most of her days in a chair and rarely went out. She died of a stroke on October 25, 1972. She is buried in Maple Hill Cemetery in Charlotte.

Gretta was probably a typical farmer’s wife for most of her life. She spent a lot of time making a home for her family and cooking. She also helped out with the farm work and did the gardening. Being tied to a farm and somewhat isolated out in the country, there was not a lot of social time or travel, but Donna remembers going to pedro parties on occasion. Family was the main social connection. There was no church near, so they did not go to church. It was a great thing in the early 1950s when they got a phone with a party line—phone number 1248J2.

I remember Grandma spending a lot of time in the kitchen. On Saturdays she baked bread and pies and cooked beans in a little enameled pan with no handle. She made her bread from a potato yeast she nurtured from week to week. She canned jam, apple butter, and pickles of all kinds—even watermelon, beets (for use with eggs), and peaches (a good Pennsylvania Dutch meal always had plenty of pickles). She made sweets such as stuffed dates, taffy, popcorn balls, molasses cookies, and penuche. She cooked her own chicken from scratch—that means she got the chicks, fed them, killed them, eviscerated them, plucked them, and cooked them. I remember being banned from the kitchen during the more gory parts of the process, but we did get the feet to play with afterwards. They drove the dogs crazy when we pulled the tendons and scratched the dogs’ heads with them.

Grandma also did quite a bit of embroidery and crochet. She made a lot of doilies, which she put to good use on the arms and backs of chairs so Grandpa wouldn’t get the chairs dirty. Her pillowcases all had embroidered flowers or crocheted edgings. She used to collect Gold Bell gift stamps from the grocery store. They would be pasted into little booklets, which could be turned in for all kinds of neat things pictured in the Gold Bell catalog. But she always seemed to turn hers in for pillowcases, which cost one book for a set of 2.

She did a lot of gardening, mostly out of necessity, but also out of enjoyment. During our weekly visit, we usually had a garden tour to see the progress of all the plants, and we often spent a while shelling peas or snapping beans at her direction. She enjoyed her rose of Sharon bushes, and also had quite a green thumb when it came to plants inside. She had a large basket of ferns in the dining room, and her violets, Christmas cactus, and other plants seemed to flourish. She often had jars of cuttings getting ready to give to someone.

Grandma liked to do jigsaw puzzles, and there was often a card table set up with a puzzle in progress. If we visited on Saturday, and stayed for the evening, we’d watch her favorite things on TV—Lawrence Welk and professional wrestling.

Gretta in her young years

When Donna moved from her Fitch Street home in 2001 she had a tag sale in the house. Afterwards, the sale manager cleaned the remaining things out and prepared the home to be sold. Mary and I went through the empty house. In the bedroom, I noticed a 1" scrap of paper on the floor, which I almost left there. It wasn't my job to clean up! But I decided I should be responsible and put in the trash. Imagine my delight when I turned it over and found Grandma, which picture I had never before seen!