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Gertrude S. Eddy, 103, longtime nurse
By Emma Stickgold, Globe Correspondent | January 9, 2005
Gertrude Sandusky Eddy was a no-nonsense, self-deprecating nurse who took care of her neighbors and friends well into her 90s. For decades she made house calls to patients throughout Greater Boston. At 103, she and her sister, Dorothy McMahon of Lynn, were among the oldest sets of twins in the country.
Mrs. Eddy, known to many as Trudy, died from heart failure Dec. 22 in Youville Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Cambridge.
The longtime Belmont resident was "both extremely generous and unsentimental," said a grandson, Jay Sandusky of Brooklyn, N.Y.
Working out of many area hospitals -- including Children's, Massachusetts General, and Lynn Hospital -- Mrs. Eddy dealt with patients in a firm but gentle manner. She was not one to shirk her responsibility to inform patients of their prognosis.
A Beverly native, she and her sister were infants when they went to Prince Edward Island to live with their grandmother. She moved back to Beverly about a decade later and eventually attended Beverly High School. She received her degree in nursing from Salem State College.
Her husband, Albert A. Sandusky, died while she was in her early 30s, at the height of the Depression. In the 1940s, she married Melvin D. Eddy; he died in 1965.
Mrs. Eddy retired from nursing in the mid-1970s, but she was known to nurse many friends and neighbors through illnesses. She often made it a point to bring over her famous blueberry muffins and chicken soup.
Mrs. Eddy used to tell the story of how she was once at home, hunting high and low for cheesecloth to make jam, when she spotted her wedding veil. She used it to complete the culinary project.
"That's the sort of no-nonsense, clever thinking that helped her to live 103 years," Sandusky said.
At her 100th birthday party, it took her three puffs to blow out the 10 candles on her cake -- each one representing 10 years of her life. According to a story in the local newspaper, she exclaimed, "Three puffs -- I'm going to live three more years. Good!"
She did.
In addition to her sister and grandson, Mrs. Eddy leaves another grandson, Mark Sandusky of Miami.
Services were held earlier this week. Burial was in Puritan Lawn Cemetery in Peabody
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