Stanley Hawkins Martineau
submitted by: Tucker Thompson
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This is the life story of my great-grandpa, Stanley Hawkins Martineau. His name was Stanley, but everyone called him Bud so that’s the name that stuck. Bud was born on November 1st, 1924 in Blanding, UT. He was the third oldest of eleven children. Shortly after he was born, his family moved to Old Mexico. He lived in a small house with two bedrooms and the kids slept on the floor.
It was a rough life living in Mexico. My great-grandpa’s family didn’t have much money for toys, so my great-grandpa Bud played with sticks and bones and was happy with what he had. Bud also had a lot of fun catching fish, snakes, and waterbugs. His chores were to haul water, wash clothes, pull weeds for the pigs, gather eggs, feed chickens, and hoe weeds. He was a hard worker.
In school, my great-grandpa was left handed but his teacher made him write with his right hand so he learned to write with both. Sometimes my great-grandpa came home in tears because he had to walk a mile to school every day, including winter, without a coat, gloves, or shoes.
When he was twelve, Bud moved back to Blanding, UT. My great-grandpa’s dad was running a mill that shut down a little while later, so his dad tried to farm full-time instead. He made a deal for some land in Westwater Canyon and they made a house out of a cave when my great grandpa was fifteen years old. My great-grandpa helped clean out the cave using mares and a scraper. He found a nine and a half inch pot with squash seeds and a corn cob in the top. They also found an old corpse of a person in the back of the cave.
Two weeks before Bud was 16, he left high school and went to a government trade school in Provo called the N.Y.A. (National Youth Administration) where he learned mechanics. He also signed up for the draft while he was there. Years later he went back to high school and got his diploma the same time that his oldest daughter graduated from high school because education was important to him.
He did end up being called in to the military. Bud was promoted to Private First Class in Abilene Texas. When Bud went to Burma India, he was sent up near the front lines to guard ammunition and supplies. One of the people he shared a tent with brought back a little dog from a village and gave the dog to Bud because he knew he would be kind to it. He named the dog Jiggs. Then Bud went to Shanghai China and when he came back from China his dog was nearly starved to death because she wouldn’t eat while Bud was gone. He found his dog laying next to the tent, waiting for him to come back. He had to call her name three times before the dog recognized that it was him. Jiggs had a fever but recovered quickly, but two weeks later her hair fell out and Bud saw that Jiggs had worms and other sicknesses and the doctor said that he had to lay Jiggs down to rest. That made him really sad and he really missed his dog.
When the war was over, Bud and six other people had earned two battle stars and the rest of the group only had one star, so he got to go home before them. He served in the military for two years and three months, and got home in the spring of 1946.
A little while after he got home, Bud met his future wife, Nancy. They got married and had nine children. When my great-grandpa was 61 he went back to college and got his two-year degree. Sadly, he died the next year when he was 62 in a car accident. I will never have a life quite like my great-grandpa’s but I admire him for all his hard work and for the dedication he had for the United States and for his family.