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Ginny Martineau
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How many FOGG volunteers grew up with no electricity or running water? Ginny is one who remembers using kerosene lanterns until age 10 and having no indoor plumbing until age 12. This was not in some sunny Mexican clime, but on her parents’ farm in North Dakota, only 30 miles from the Canadian border. Think wind and snow, carrying water to the house, heating it on the stove, going to the outhouse (“the biffy”), banking coal in the furnace at night to make sure there would still be embers left in the cold morning hours. Theirs was a 640-acre section where they raised wheat and barley as cash crops as well as cattle and pigs for market. For their own consumption they also had chickens, turkeys and milk cows.
Ginny’s parents drove her, by horse and sled when necessary, to a nearby one-room school house through 7th grade. From 8th grade through high school, they had about a 12-mile drive to town, meaning a significant 50 miles of driving a day (no busses). After high school, Ginny worked for 9 years at the bank in town, Cando, so-named when the town was vying for designation as county seat and touting its “can-do” capacities. Cando won out over another town calling itself Willdo. The bank was next door to the drugstore/soda fountain, the local high school hangout. It was there that Bob, an old family friend, just back from serving in the navy and becoming a pharmacist, started working in his father’s business and asked Ginny out. In a town of 1500, most people know one another. After marrying, they set their sights southward. First to Jamestown, just west of Fargo, where they owned the pharmacy in a medical clinic and where their son, Darcy was born. Bob and Ginny came to Colorado Springs in 1972 and opened the first pharmaceutical franchise, Medicine Shoppe International, west of the Mississippi. When they sold it in 1990, it was the oldest Medicine Shoppe still in existence. During the pharmacy years, Ginny served in all capacities, clerk, aid, deliveries.
Ginny has been a Wednesday hiker all along the front range with the “Rocky Mountain High-kers “ for 30 years. They also travel together: the Tetons, Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Arches, Capital Reef, Zion, Bryce, Copper Canyon… Some of Ginny’s favorite reading is focused on frontier and Indian life, geology, fossils, birds, wildflowers. She has been a FOGG member since 1995, at the info kiosk and leading nature walks. Ginny is anything but a Madison Avenue self-promoter, but is quite the grassroots Cando representative and wellspring of knowledge. Her Thursday morning fellow volunteers say they can never stump her, try as they may.
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