A JOYOUS LIFE LOST

One death amid millions exemplifies COVID’s toll

The woman smiling and joking beyond the glass wall in midJanuary didn’t know she had just days to live. She expected to leave the COVID ward at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital the next day and wait out the illness and her deep cough at home in the guest room, keeping her husband safe.

Instead, on Jan. 23, two weeks after her 75th birthday, Carmelita Martinez died, becoming one of more than 530,000 Americans and more than 2.6 million people worldwide lost since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

This is the story of one woman among those millions, a school lunch lady from Salinas who grew up picking fruit alongside migrant workers, yet whose family roots in the United States stretched back 156 years.

She also belonged to that sisterhood of women who

survived violence at the hands of a man, her family said. It happened a long time ago. This mother, sister and grandmother who vanished before many people even knew she was ill had since found joy, a fullthroated kind that often got her dancing and laughing and pulling up those around her to join in as she sang to the music.

That was how 2020 began for Martinez, who posted a photo of herself and husband Lynn Taylor surrounded by friends and family at a Motown show on Jan. 15. The U.S. was five days from reporting its first coronavirus case. “Having a very Fantastic time in Las Vegas,” she wrote. She and Taylor had already booked a Princess Cruise to Hawaii for April — it never happened — and had planned trips to Italy and the Panama Canal.

So adored was Carmelita Martinez that, at her funeral in San Jose, her daughter, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren, nieces and nephews — 49ers fans all — wore Raiders caps, shirts and ties to honor the matriarch’s preference.

But the 50 or so mourners who gathered at El Buen Pastor Pentecostal Church in February to say goodbye were merely giving back to Martinez something they had received from her many times over.

“She loved people,” granddaughter Melissa Rivera, 33, told those gathered. “She loved helping. She loved the look on your face when she surprised you with a little goody. She helped numerous kids stay on track. She helped a number of them get their graduation stuff because, for whatever reason, they couldn’t afford it at the time . ... The world lost a real one today.”

***

A world war had ended and a new year had dawned when Carmelita Martinez entered the world on Jan. 9, 1946, in San Jose. She was the second of Lupe and Robert Martinez’s six children — four girls and two boys.

“I want to say she was a mischievous kid,” Martinez’s daughter, Stephanie Ybarra, said as she reminisced in the living room of the San Jose home her daughter, Rivera, shares with her family and Martinez’s older sister, Roberta Martinez. There was the story about little Carmelita spearing her little brother’s leg with a fork. Then a pause ... “and she slammed a door on your finger,” Ybarra said, turning to her aunt with eyebrows raised.

Roberta nodded. “It got cut off,” she said, holding up the stub. “Mom kept it in a jar.”

“But I got her back,” Roberta chuckled, recalling the time their father warned the kids not to play with a sharpedged metal barrel. Naturally, “we put Carmelita in, and we rolled her,” she said. The scar on Martinez’s right shoulder lasted the rest of her life.

The Martinez children picked fruit to help their father, a postal employee, with the finances. He later took a job at the San Jose city dump. A strict parent, he wouldn’t allow his teenage daughters to venture out at night. So they stayed home “and danced with the doorknobs,” Ybarra said.

The first Martinez born on U.S. soil was Remigio Raymond Martinez Ochoa, in the territory of Arizona on Oct. 11, 1865. His son, Jose Bernal Martinez, ventured west in 1930 with his wife, Cruz Bojorquez, ahead of thousands of other migrants who would soon flee the Dust Bowl of the Midwest — also in search of a brighter future in California.

On her mother’s side, Carmelita Martinez descended from a soldier who fought beside Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution. Also in the U.S. since the 19th century, the Cardona side were migrant workers who followed the walnut, prune and strawberry seasons. Deeply religious, they built the little white church where Pastor Madaline Molina would lead the Pentecostal service for her cousin, Martinez.

***

Martinez graduated from San Jose High in the early 1960s, the only one of her siblings to do so. Like many young people her age, she spent the 1960s in search of herself, first living with an aunt near Los Angeles, then attending beauty school. She also dated a soldier from San Jose.

Stephanie’s birth in 1970 meant it was time for Martinez to buckle down. She went to work at a convalescent home, and her parents cared for the baby. But when Martinez married a Salinas man in 1972, her parents made it clear: They would keep their granddaughter. With little choice, Martinez joined her husband in Salinas.

Her second child, Michael, was born that year. But the marriage failed. Instead, Martinez found her passion working at Prunedale Elementary, preparing meals and doling out love.

“She just flourished,” Ybarra, said. “She would feed the children even if there was no money on their books for lunch.”

Years later, a janitor at the school caught Martinez’s eye. She asked around, heard good things about Lynn Taylor, and invited him to dinner. She made meat loaf.

Although the janitor and the lunch lady were nine years apart — she was 33, and he was 24 when they met in 1979 — both were kind, and both loved sports. She was outgoing, and he loved that she was.

Rivera recalled a story Taylor told the family, about a moment that signaled the end of her grandmother’s old life, and the start of a new one. One day, Martinez arrived at work wearing sunglasses. Taylor asked her to take them off, but she refused. Puzzled, Taylor persisted, and finally persuaded her. Martinez had been hiding two black eyes.

“His heart dropped for her,” she said. “He was floored that someone could do this.”

***

Soon Martinez and Taylor became inseparable. Both found new jobs at North Monterey County High School.

“They loved the schools,” Rivera said. “A kid would say ‘Come to the football game!’ And she’d say, ‘OK!’ ”

One of those kids was Mike Hatten, 43, who met Martinez as a freshman in 1991. “I had my troubles,” he told the congregation through tears at her funeral. “But I could never do wrong in her eyes.”

Hatten had girl troubles. He fell in with the wrong crowd. He made mistakes. But the lunch lady knew every kid, and when she saw Hatten looking uncharacteristically glum, she checked in.

One of her cures was homemade chocolate chip cookies, an immediate antidote for Hatten and every kid lucky enough to get one. Another was her gift of listening. Martinez worked a second job at Grandma Buffalo’s cookie shop at the Northridge Mall in Salinas. She’d tell troubled kids to drop by and talk.

“There were things I didn’t want to share with my folks. But I could always talk to her,”

Hatten said in an interview. She was a mother to students who needed one, he said. She could talk easily about sports — but always ended the conversation in time for the kid to get to class.

She bought graduation gowns for those who couldn’t afford them, then showed up with roses. She’d buy from every child’s fundraiser, encouraged kids to graduate on time, and counseled gang members to quit fighting.

“They loved her,” Rivera said. “They would always apologize to her and invite her to their graduation. She went — and was the loudest person in the room.”

Hatten asked Martinez to be his godmother. “She said, ‘Yes, I will!’

“From ’91 until she passed, she was always there for me,” he said. Her sudden death from COVID was shocking. “She was always the healthiest, happiest person.”

After the funeral, he said he went home “and just bawled my eyes out.”

***

Martinez and Taylor retired in 2014 and turned for the first time to the pleasures of life: cruising to Alaska and Mexico, dancing, county fairs, casinos, and — always, for Martinez — baking.

Once, Taylor invited her to a ZZ Top concert. Martinez said she didn’t like ZZ Top but agreed to go along. “By the first song, she’s standing up on the chair,” Rivera laughed. “Lynn said, ‘I thought you didn’t like ZZ Top!’ She said, ‘Shhhh!’ ”

“It’s embarrassing!” Ybarra said, smiling at the memory. “We went on a cruise with her, and she would get up and start singing and dancing! I’d thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, lady, come sit down!’”

One trip to Mexico offered a lifechanging revelation: Her name was not, in fact, her name.

A border guard blocked her way back into the U.S., pointing out that her birth certificate said “Carmelita,” while her driver’s license said “Carmen.” Martinez had been “Carmen” all her life and assumed that the “Carmelita” on her birth certificate was the same name, but in Spanish.

“She did not speak Spanish!” Ybarra said. “We used to make fun of her. But they weren’t going to let her come back — so after that, she switched everything” and became Carmelita ever after.

Martinez had two children, six grandchildren and nine greatgrandchildren, including one due in July, and another, Giovanni, whom she never forgot. He was stillborn in 2016.

“She loved her family,” Ybarra said at the funeral. “Oh, my God, what she wouldn’t do for her family.”

Ybarra works at Costco in Fremont. Martinez’s son, Michael Millan of Phoenix, works for FedEx. Rivera, a casino dealer in San Jose, is among 300 people nationwide chosen this month by NASA to join its competitive Aerospace Scholars program for community college students with an aptitude for math and science.

Also in the family are a DJ, a clothes clerk with nursing skills, a tech employee, a construction worker, a chef and students galore.

***

The coronavirus pandemic was surging in early December, and so was hope because the first vaccine was poised for approval. By Dec. 6, Martinez was already wishing people Merry Christmas on Facebook. Then, weeks before she would turn 75, she let family and friends know the gift she wanted most.

“For my birthday this year,” she posted on Dec. 16, “I’m asking donations to St. Jude Children’s Research,” a nonprofit hospital headquartered in Tennessee that charges nothing for treatment, travel, housing or food. “Their mission means a lot to me.”

When her birthday rolled around, Martinez’s Facebook page lit up with festive emoji and loving wishes. Her thankyous were just as flashy. She didn’t mention her sore throat.

Two days later, on Jan. 11, Martinez tested positive for the coronavirus. On Jan. 13, Taylor called Ybarra. He said her mother was too weak to get out of bed and couldn’t eat.

Ybarra, 75 miles to the north, set up a text with Rivera and her other daughter, Vanessa Garza, 31, who had studied nursing. Garza called Martinez, then texted back: “She has pneumonia. I can hear it in her lungs and her breathing.”

Rivera picked up Garza in Gilroy, drove to Salinas and followed Taylor and Martinez to the hospital, where nurses installed Martinez in a glassenclosed room.

The next day, Jan. 14, she rallied but worried that her doctors planned to send her home the next morning. She texted Ybarra that “all my tests are doing great except my breathing, so they are sending me a breathing machine.”

Even so, when nurses asked their COVID patients if any felt well enough to speak with a visiting Chronicle reporter, Martinez volunteered.

That evening, a smiling Martinez held a lively conversation by phone with the reporter outside her room, joking that her son was “a little spoiled” for calling her so much, and telling everyone who would read the Chronicle story: “People! Please, please, wear a mask at all times. Wash your hands the minute you drop your groceries at the table. Stay out of the public, and take care of yourselves.”

She and the reporter blew kisses to each other through the glass as the interview ended.

But Martinez did not go home the next day. Her pneumonia worsened. Doctors told the family that the antibiotics could no longer beat it back, and that the antiviral COVID treatment remdesivir had done all it could.

***

On Feb. 3, dozens of Martinez’s family and friends packed into El Buen Pastor. Because she had died of COVID19, her coffin lay closed.

“Carmelita was such a joyful person,” Pastor Molina said. “She loved to be out. She loved to go dancing. She loved to spend all her money on cruises.”

People laughed.

“The tragedy of life,” Molina said, “is not death. It is what we let die in life when we’re alive.”

Nic coury / Special to The chronicle Nurse Cassie Barber tends to Carmelita Martinez at a COVID unit at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital in January.

Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle Friends and family mourn Carmelita Martinez outside Pastor El Buen church in San Jose. Martinez, a longtime school lunch lady lost to the coronavirus, leaves a loving legacy.

Courtesy Stephanie Ybarra Carmelita Martinez (left) smiles with family members in an undated photo. Martinez died of COVID19 on Jan. 23.

Nic Coury / Special to The Chronicle Sonny Mendez prays at cousin Carmelita Martinez’s funeral at San Jose’s El Buen Pastor Church as Pastor Madaline Molina (left), another cousin, leads the service.