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I grew up as a child with a dad who was serving in the Air Force. I attended eight different schools in places ranging from Germany to Nebraska to California with a few others to boot, just to graduate high school. The most permanent home I knew was Marshalltown, where my grandparents, Martha-Ellen and Joe Tye, lived in the same house all the time, something quite alien to me.
Martha-Ellen, well known to many Marshalltowners, was a modest woman with a big heart and a sometimes stubborn temperament.
When Martha-Ellen visited me while I was working in New York City, we went out furniture shopping, discovering that we had decidedly different tastes in furniture. In the end, I got a few of my choices, only after pointing out that I was the one paying. My fiancé, upon first viewing our new furniture choices, explained to me that most pieces didn't go together and weren't all that nice anyway. My grandmother and I had failed miserably.
My then fiancé first met Martha-Ellen in person after we had married and relocated to London. Unfortunately, I was told I had to go to Tokyo during the visit and so left my wife on her own. She took Martha-Ellen out to see London and, while doing so, it started to rain (sprinkle really). My wife put up her umbrella and suggested Martha Ellen do the same, to which Martha-Ellen replied, "it's not raining" and left her umbrella down. Even as the rain increased, Martha-Ellen refused to back down and her umbrella stayed closed. Finally, as the rain continued to gain intensity, my wife suggested they go into a pub for lunch. Martha-Ellen, never one to turn down a meal, was able to exit the rain never having given in to the umbrella.
Martha-Ellen loved music, and particularly the opera. She invited me to see much of Wagners Ring Cycle, an eight-hour ordeal, at the Metropolitan Opera. Just coming off a grueling overseas business trip that day, I was tired, and I didn't like opera in any case. However, she was my grandmother, so not going was not an option. Prior to the opera starting, Martha-Ellen, seeing I was very tired, mentioned that her doctor had given her "stay awake pills" and did I want one? My answer being obvious, she opened her little container only to point out to me that there were only two pills, and they were for Martha Ellen and her sister-in-law. I was out of luck. Hours into the opera, while I was struggling to stay awake, Martha Ellen was comfortably snoring next to me. Another of her wonderful abilities appeared to be able to deliver notable irony, while asleep.
Martha-Ellen didn't wear her heart on her sleeve. But that didn't mean it wasn't there and it wasn't huge. Martha-Ellen was the first one other than my wife and me to see our triplets after their very premature birth. When she visited them two years later, she started crying because she feared she wouldn't live long enough to see them grow up. She didn't often show emotion, but it was always there.
One of the most remarkable things about Martha-Ellen, was her modesty, not something always common in those with enhanced circumstances. While living in London, I went to see Martha Ellen in Graz, Austria, where she was the primary funder of an annual gathering of young musicians. A place where they could practice and perfect their musical skills. When I went to see her room, it was more like an austere little room one might expect in a nunnery. Her job was to distribute the mail to all the students. This was the woman funding pretty much the whole thing? Yup, this was Martha-Ellen Tye. A wonderful, sometimes argumentative woman, who didn't have a snooty bone in her body but had a very big heart. Martha-Ellen bequeathed her estate to form the Martha-Ellen Tye Foundation to support arts and education, amongst other things, in Marshalltown Iowa. Some would say her great love was opera. I would say her great love was Marshalltown.
Steven Tye graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas in 1975. He worked in the banking industry in Texas for six years before being transferred to London, where he worked for 3 years, joining Solomon Brothers, before being transferred to New York City where he worked for over three years and met his wife of 40 years. He left Solomon Brothers in 1995 as the managing director in charge of European bond syndication and trading. Tye was the co-founder of OnLine Finance, subsequently sold to GMAC. He moved back to Florida in 2002, where he continued working with startups, usually unsuccessfully. Tye is the father of triplets who were born three months prematurely in London. Upon returning to the USA in 2002, he and his wife took their very English kids around the continental United States so that they could be introduced to their new, albeit strange (for them), home. Tye and his wife now spend their time between New Smyrna Beach, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina.