Joy Martin

Joyce Marie Martin was a loving and devoted mother, grandmother, and career federal civil servant who loved her daughter MaryAnn, granddaughters Kathleen, Elizabeth, and Margaret, her granddaughters’ father Eric, and the country she served for over 40 years. She died at home on January 18, 2025.

Born on June 8, 1951, in Alabama, Joy grew up in Avon Park, Florida. A military wife, she moved around the country numerous times until the Air Force stationed their family at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in December 1984. She worked as a switchboard operator for many years, taking her young daughter to work with her at Mather Air Force Base in Sacramento, California, when she and her ex-husband’s shifts as an air traffic controller conflicted.

Joy’s fried chicken was legendary and her family would eat it cold when taking their sailboat on the lake in California. She knew how to make vegetables sing as a side dish, and MaryAnn’s friends growing up knew her mom had cooked a killer meal when they came over to eat. Joy cooked all the food for MaryAnn’s wedding in 2001, because nothing catered could compare.

Joy began work at Tinker in 1985 as a secretary at the Oklahoma Air Logistics Center. MaryAnn would find notepads with her mother’s shorthand practice for transcription as she rummaged through her mom’s nightstands as a small child. MaryAnn would also find sketchpads with her mother’s pencil drawings, and listen to the whir of Joy’s sewing machine as she created beautiful dresses for MaryAnn in elementary school or pieced together intricate quilts that Joy quilted by hand.

Joy was an avid cross-stitcher until her eyesight grew too poor for the detailed work, but sustained a constant knitting project until the end. The afghans her mother knitted have always been, but are particularly now some of MaryAnn’s most prized possessions. MaryAnn requested an afghan and a cable-knit cardigan from her mother when her daughter Elizabeth’s cancer returned in 2020 and used both as comfort for the many days and nights in the hospital during Zuzu’s treatment.

In Oklahoma City, she raised her only daughter in the public schools outside of Tinker AFB in Midwest City-Del City Public School district. She was a dedicated and active parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church on Tinker, serving as an RCIA sponsor and volunteer after converting to the faith. Joy proudly sent MaryAnn to a public university at the University of Oklahoma, and cheered as MaryAnn walked the stage as a first generation student with a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, also a public university.

By the time Joy retired in 2018 after 42 years of service to the United States government, Joy was a GS-12 financial engineer for the B-52 missile defense systems. She proudly worked to defend her country with her exceptional, well-trained, and dedicated civil service and active duty colleagues and stood in front of a standing room only crowd at her retirement ceremony to close her remarks by saying, “God Bless the United States of America!” Joy would have been aghast at the defamation, degradation, and the dismantling of the civil service and federal government. She already abhorred the amorality of the first Trump administration in the country she so dearly loved and spent her life serving.

Most importantly, Joy was a beloved and irreplaceable Mimi who is deeply, deeply missed by her daughter and her daughter’s family. Joy would give a stranger the shirt off her back if they only asked, and was always up to eat a good meal with her family, even if she didn’t cook meals from scratch anymore. She provided endless art supplies to her granddaughters and her walls were covered in their artwork and pictures of her family. Joy was a steadfast comfort and presence in her family’s life and her death leaves a hole in their lives. But she is reunited with her granddaughter Zuzu, where she will love and take care of her as she did on Earth.

Joy is preceded in death by her parents, Joe Martin and Ruby Wilbanks Martin, and her granddaughter Elizabeth Joyce “Zuzu” Martin.

A reception in Joy’s memory will be held at her home on Sunday, March 16th at 2:00 p.m. at 3113 Greenwood Court, Norman, OK 73069. In lieu of flowers, friends and loved ones can support their local federal employees’ union and workers unjustly terminated by the Trump administration at Tinker AFB or donations can be made to the Oklahoma Humane Society, from where she adopted her two cats who were the most devoted men in her life, Henry and George.