Music was a big part of Marty's life, as she was a singer.  In high school she sang at a local Carbondale, PA radio station.  She worked as a clerk in a music store selling sheet music, records, and musical instruments.   It was her singing with a friend at a party, that first attracted her future husband, "Pompa I".  Growing up, as an only child, she had plenty attention from three aunts and three uncles.  Even though one of her aunts, Anna Berry, was a graduate of Penn State and became a respected teacher in the Carbondale, PA school system, Marty stopped her formal education at high school. She had definite opinions and prejudices about people, which she often shared.  As to family, she once told me, at about age ten, that she wished that she had never had any children. He marriage focused on her husband and that seemed to block a united family relationship.  As her son, we fought often...her discipline/rules were sometimes unreasonable.  At eighteen I left home to work on board a ship for the summer.  At nineteen, I joined the Marine Corps.  Joanna's love and the Marine Corps were beyond value to me.  I was never homesick. A week before marrying Joanna, she tried to talk Joanna out of marrying me.  Before she died, she did admit she was "wrong" about Joanna.  (And so much else.)

Grandma Marty kept journals for years of very detailed accounts of everyday life. She recorded things like what they ate, what time they woke and went to bed and the cost of items purchased.