Martha Louise Geddes
This is me, Martha Louise Geddes, known as Marty Lou for my first 5 years of life. Here pictured with our dog Pansy, this is probably 1958 or 1959. I would be 3 or 4 years old or thereabouts. I kind of wish, no, I definitely wish that Marty Lou had stuck, going to kindergarten changed it, the “Lou” was dropped and it then became a struggle for me. “Marty,” back in those days, was more of a boy’s name than a girl’s name and I was constantly reminded of that in school. No one could seem to understand why in the world, as a girl, my name would be Marty. In junior high school it got even worse, so to not create confusion Marty was dropped and I became Martha. I’d never in my life been called Martha, and again, back in those days it was such an old fashioned name that I struggled with it. All the other girls were the cute “Kathy, Susie, Janice,” the names that were popular and considered normal. Martha was not normal.
I’ve survived, I’m back to Marti, dropping the “y” and adding an “i” that is considered more feminine. This was determined when I was a teenager by my sister-in-law Sheri who insisted that Marty for a girl is not spelled with a “y.” So I changed it. And it’s fine. I loved my sister-in-law, she was a great gal.
But this isn’t what this story is about.
I have a few memories from before I was 10 years old, which is a little unusual but it must have been very impressionable. I was probably 3 or 4 years old. At the time we had an old blue Ford pickup, my father loved Ford and most if not all of our farm trucks and tractors were made by Ford. A lot of our equipment on the farm was “modified”, to help serve us better. He’d built sides of plywood for the truck bed to hold feed or anything that might need carting somewhere and in need of sides for the bed.
At the time we were bedding the cows with corncobs, putting them down in the barn for them to lay on. One of the challenges with having a dairy herd is keeping dry bedding for them so they didn’t get so dirty, as we needed clean cows for milking. Clean cows, clean milk. Just part of making a dairy farm work.
I was “helping” this day, for some odd reason, which just means I was along for the ride. The truck bed was full of corncobs and he’d backed the truck up to the barn and was getting ready to unload it. At the back of the bed he’d configured a trap door, also made of plywood, no wider than probably two feet. He’d open the door to allow the corn cobs to unload on the tailgate and then he’d disperse them throughout the barn.
He’d also placed me on top of the load so I could “push” the corncobs down if they stopped sliding down and out the trap door. I knew the routine, I’d seen it done before. Well, as I’m pushing (with my feet) the corncobs to slide down, I lost my footing. I became part of the load, getting sucked into the load of corncobs. Now this is not something you want to happen, children and adults have died this way, getting sucked into loads of things and not be able to breathe. More children die on farms that any other way, at least that was the statistic back then and was a fact for many years.
Well, I got sucked down but was perfectly lined up with the trap door and I came shooting out landing on the tailgate! I looked up, and seeing my father’s horrified face I cried out: “HO HO HO!” Like any good Santy Claus would say coming down the chimney. My father burst into laughter, most likely from complete relief that he wasn’t going to have to dig me out and save my life, though I don’t think there was any danger of me dying. Corncobs are porous so lots of breathing room. But you never want to see your child disappear into a load of corncobs. Or anything else for that matter.
This memory has stayed with me for over 60 years, probably because at the time it was both terrifying and exhilarating. And I think, for a 4 year old that was a pretty clever response.
