Martha Ann (Rhea) Schewe (aka Marcy, Murphy, Tractor Mimi, Big Gramma, Pizza Grandma, and MA!), age 74 of Danube, entered eternal life on Friday, March 4th, 2022, so that her husband would be blessed with the memory of their 54 joyful and loving years together every year on his birthday. Memorial Services will be held at 11:00 a.m. Thursday, March 10, 2022 at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Danube with a livestream on St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church YouTube page. Visitation will be one hour prior to the service at church on Thursday. Interment will be at a later date. Stephens Funeral Service – Redwood Valley Funeral Home is assisting the family with arrangements.
Marcy was born April 5th, 1947, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and immediately told the doctor 16 ways he handled the delivery wrong. She thought the nurses did a fine job though. Marcy was brought home by her parents H. Alexander Rhea and Mary Anne Bytner Rhea, both of whom preceded her in death and one of whom welcomed her at the pearly gates with a flyswatter and a hot plate of pierogi. As a girl Marcy walked 2 miles uphill both ways, on a heavily wooded, bear infested road to the bus stop, delivering milk from her parents’ dairy farm to the neighbors along the way. When Marcy graduated high school she couldn’t wait to get off of the farm, so she followed other young women down to Washington, D.C., and took a job as a secretary with the FAA. Always a modern woman, Marcy started attending dances where she knew handsome soldiers would be packed wall to wall. There she met a baby-faced Jim Schewe, who she fancied enough to card. That didn’t faze her someday-husband one bit. He knew he was of age and he knew he liked her spunk. They were destined to be together, surviving a near break up over the original Batman series (he loved watching it, she didn’t love him watching it) and being separated by an ocean for 16 months. Their love grew deeper as they wrote to each other every day, culminating with Jim sending her an engagement ring from his post overseas. Unfortunately she received the package on Friday the 13th, a day even the very pragmatic Marcy couldn’t bring herself to open it on. A full 24 hrs later she put the ring on her finger and wore it until he would be able to do so himself. Her soldier boy finally returned and Marcy married the man of her dreams. Well, most of her dreams. She thought she had finally escaped farm life but began to suspect otherwise when Jim insisted on visiting a bull breeding place *during their honeymoon.* After a brief stint in Pennsylvania (Jim wondered how a guy was supposed to see where he was going with all of those hills in the way) the newly married couple moved back to Minnesota so that they could… you guessed it… farm. Determined to help Jim achieve his dream, Marcy started swooping in on auctions to procure farm equipment like it was her job… convincingly, because someone actually asked her if it was her job. She also snagged a few more longtime friends she hadn’t met before, to be sure. Her father-in-law always wondered how Jim got so lucky to find someone like her, “She can do it all,” he said.
Marcy and Jim produced a brood of farm hands: Jim Schewe (George), Deb (Jon) Lang, Renae (Bryan) Anderson, Toni (Steph) Schewe, and Jeff (Leslie) Schewe. She filled decades of life with conversation, farm work, raising generations of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren (who she loved exponentially more the younger they got), auctions, coffee, church, flirting with her husband, grumbling about the squirrels, making bars (Cherry Berries on a Cloud!), genealogy, flowers, heading to Max’s with her beloved church family, helping those in need, road tripping with her husband to visit family and friends, defending the underdog (and wondering why her children are so outspoken), refinishing floors & cabinets, figuring out selfies/Facebook/SnapChat so that she could keep up with the children, and, if the occasion arose, playing a mean game of Sequence. Her fierce and vibrant spirit is carried on by her soulmate, her 5 children, 9 grandchildren, 5 great grandchildren, 7 siblings, a handful of hated squirrels, a menagerie of farm animals, and a whole wide world full of longtime friends, some of whom she hadn’t gotten around to meeting yet.
