Agronomy aide wins award for her heart, mind and spirit

By TOM CAMPBELL

Photo by Tom Campbell

Two of the three winners of the Eudoxia Girard Martin Award represent the College of Agriculture. The 2003 award, honoring an outstanding woman administrative assistant on the Purdue campus, was presented to Sandy Spitznagle (left), administrative assistant in the agronomy department. Katy Ibrahim (right), International Programs in Agriculture, was the 2002 winner.

When Katy Ibrahim, a program administrator in the Office of International Programs in Agriculture, won the second annual Eudoxia Girard Martin Memorial Staff Recognition Award in 2002, one of the first people to call with congratulations was Sandy Spitznagle.

“I was so happy for her, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person” says Spitznagle, administrative assistant to Craig Beyrouty, who is head of the Department of Agronomy.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Spitznagle won the Martin Award for 2003.

“I was speechless,” says Spitznagle, honored at the Purdue Clerical and Service Staff Recognition Program on Dec. 3.

Martin’s family established the award in 2001 to honor the life of an incredible woman who died in 1977.

When her husband died from influenza during the epidemic in 1918, Eudoxia Girard Martin was left to care for three sons, ages 2, 4 and 6. She was one of the first women to work in a war production plant in Fort Wayne, but lost her job to a returning World War I veteran.

Destitute, she moved to Lafayette and placed her three children in an orphanage. Martin accepted a position as a live-in domestic, working seven days a week.

Martin went to night school to learn secretarial skills. Every Sunday, according to her only living son, Leslie Martin of Versailles, Ky., she walked eight miles to be with her children in the orphanage.

This was her life for five years, according to her son, until she got a job as a secretary at the Tippecanoe County Farm Bureau. The first thing she did was get her oldest son out of the orphanage. Two years later, she brought her other two sons home.

All three boys went on to earn Purdue degrees, and two of them received two Purdue degrees.

Martin worked three positions during her career — secretary in the Tippecanoe County Farm Bureau, secretary to the mayor of Lafayette and executive secretary to the dean of engineering at Purdue.

“The award is presented annually to a woman staff member who, in the performance of her duties, has demonstrated those personal qualities of heart, mind and spirit that evince a love for and helpfulness to students, staff and faculty, the qualities that were characteristics of our mother in all of her life’s pursuits,” says Leslie Martin.

Spitznagle has worked for four different department heads since she joined the Department of Agronomy in 1967.

“Throughout a typical workweek, Sandy acts as secretary, supervisor, comforter, consoler, advocate, cheerleader, organizer, interior designer, special events coordinator, disciplinarian, mediator, facilitator, ombudsman, departmental historian, graphics designer and educator,” Beyrouty says in her nomination. “She is a friend to all, and all feel welcome to Purdue and Agronomy as a result of Sandy.”

The recipient of the award receives a plaque and $1,000. The first winner was Carol Grafnitz, who is retired from the Schools of Engineering.

Contact Spitznagle at sspitz@purdue.edu