L.B. Martin

Told by His Son

A tall, lean Marine, with a wild shock of hair, having won “the war to end all wars,” returned home to Texas. The first thing he did was go to a county dance, where he spotted a shapely young girl. He called on her in the old-fashioned way, sitting in the parlor surrounded by watchful kinfolks. Her daddy thought it was strange that he wore his uniform. He did not know that this was the only garment the young man owned.

She was a lovely girl, with her high-cheek bones inherited from one of her mother’s Indian grandparents. Though she was fair, some of her brothers had a full-blooded look.

After she turned 16 (not an unusual age for girls to marry back then), Lillie Mae Hardin -- no relation, so far as we know, to the gunslinger – married Marion Bee Martin (can’t imagine know where the “Bee” could’ve come from). In not too long – May 22, 1921, to be exact -- in Dublin, Texas, Lillie gave birth to her first of four children, my dad. Evidently, the young couple didn’t have enough money for a full name, so they just gave him initials, the L from his mother’s first name and the B from his father’s middle one. My Dad always wished he had a name, any name -- Tom, Dick, Harry, Alphonso – anything just not to have to fill out all forms as “L. (only) B. (only) Martin.” People started calling him, Lonely Bonely. My Mom would say the LB stood for Lazy Boy, but Dad preferred Lover Boy.

But he wasn’t yet any of those things. He was just a little one, both of whose parents worked hard for their meager living. Times were hard and they needed a job and a roof over their heads. A farmer asked the former Marine if he knew how to butcher a hog. As he or somebody taught me long ago, “yes” is always the right answer. Unfortunately, it was a not so white a lie. His father had been a country doctor, with the impressive name, John William Houston Martin. He hadn’t really wanted to practice medicine. He went to medical school at Vanderbilt to cure himself, being a sickly young man. That took money, of course, but, before the “late unpleasantness,” the future doctor’s father – Robert Martin – had evidently been the leading man in the county – he was called “Squire.”

Squire Martin’s father, Walter, like many Scotch-Irish had crossed the Applachians some time back to unsettled Tennessee, where a man with gumption and a strong back could get a plot of land for himself. That plot grew into a prosperous farm, which they preferred to call a “plantation” since the house was made of brick instead of felled timber. Squire Martin was a distinguished, handsome man – we have a photo of him circa 1860 – who, it is said, got so worked up making a speech against Lincoln that, sitting down in a cold draft, he “burst a blood vessel” and died. In a few years, all that would be gone with the wind. They had a handful of slaves, who of course left. Not finding work, all but one returned after a while, but times were hard and Doc Martin set out for the Texas plains.

And so the young Marine who was the doctor’s son knew little about farming. Fortunately, the wife he had chosen was not just a pretty little thing. She was strong and hard-working and knew how to butcher a hog and just about everything else you can do on a farm. By morning, the hog had been butchered and the young couple got the job and a roof over their heads – the farmer’s chicken coop. My Dad’s mom says she pulled cotton (not picked bowls, a technical distinction she always made when telling the story), dragging little L.B. beside her in a basket, under a cloth to shield him from the sun, and stopping to nurse him as needed.

Those little Texas towns had schoolhouses with all grades, usually up to grade eight, present in one-room. The library would consist of a single large bookcase. “I read every book they had,” he says, “And I was valedictorian of my graduating class. Of course, there were only three students graduating.”

Although Dad enjoyed school, there was something he enjoyed more – “I loved to go to the Big Swimming Hole.” His favorite uncle was J. T. Hardin. “He would take us boys there sometimes.” The sun was hot and the water was cool. “We would strip naked and dive in.” Many years later, Dad revisited the Big Hole. “It wasn’t nearly as big as I had remembered it.”

Things were somewhat wild back then – at least in the Martin family. Dad’s father was fun but high-tempered, and his mother was hard-working and high-strung. They were both life partners (“marry a helpmate,” she always said) and sparring partners. He owned a gun and one day my Dad’s younger brother, Marion Finley (later called “Marty”), found it and, just being a kid, went out to play cowboys and Indians with his brother, William Jennings (didn’t they have great names in those days?). Somehow he got shot, or shot his brother. Anyway, what everybody remembers is Marty crying. “These are my brand new overalls, and now they’re all bloody!” Jennings was closest in age to Dad and they were buddies. Unfortunately, he got pneumonia and died when he was only sixteen – one of those illnesses no longer fatal for the young.

Like many kids, Dad loved sports, especially football. By high-school, he was quite an athlete. In spite of his size – 5’7” and 160 pounds – he was a lineman – and the only unanimous pick for the tricounty Allstar team. How did he do that? “The first play I would hit ‘em as hard as I could. They would hit me hard the next time, and I would just hold back and let them stumble forward. After that, they would never know what was coming and couldn’t hit me with everything.”

Dad was also a runner, and fast. He had always just run the whole race as hard as he could. When he came to the big race that counts, his coach told him, “The other guys will try to run you out of breath. So you pace yourself and then speed up at the end.” “I did what he told me,” Dad says, “but, when it came time to speed up, I couldn’t change pace.” Later his coach told him, “You are the best athlete I have ever coached.” “I was really surprised to hear that,” Dad said. The coach promised to get him a football scholarship at the university.

Dad also liked to box, and an opportunity came along to make good money prize-fighting. A promoter had seen him and asked told him to come down to the gym where the boxers hung out and they could sign a deal. “I got there early, so I went to watch the other boxers. They all had beat-up faces and cauliflower ears. One had the top end of the nose completed flattened and just the tip stuck out. Some of them seemed punch-drunk. I knew what would happen to me. The only way I could win fights was by getting in close and taking a lot of punishment. When the promoter came in and I told him, ‘I don’t want any part of this.’” The coach agreed. “He told me, ‘If you fight just once for money, you will lose your amateur status forever.”

It is always hard for me to picture Dad as he describes himself in those days. “I had a reputation for being wild,” he says. “We were in a dry county and, hard up one night, my buddy and I tried to get drunk by drinking bottles of vanilla extract. We got so sick we never tried that again. Another time, we needed money and there was a liquor store right across the county line. We had guns. We decided to rob it but got cold feet.”

Pretty soon, Dad had a girlfriend, quite attractive and he would have married her. “But she wanted to go to a particular college and I told her not to. That was the college where the ‘wild girls’ go. She went there anyway, so I broke it off.”

Many years later, when my parents went to a class reunion, that girl was there with her husband – but cozied up to Dad and is standing by him instead of her husband when the group photo was taken. “If anything happened to me,” Mom would say, “that gal would be on the next plane to California.”

One evening, Dad saw that there was some kind of dance over near Turkey, Texas. He didn’t expect to find much there but he and his buddies decided to check it out. They went in and there was a total cutie, dancing with another girl, as they did back then. “She looked like an over-developed fourteen-year-old,” Dad says. Too young, he thought, but he asked her to dance. “How old are you?” “I’ll be eighteen next month.” Okay! After some dancing, Dad asked if he could take her home. Okay, she said, but explained that she was there with two other girls. They had been brought by some other guys, and her coat was in their car. Dad went out to get her coat, but the guys who brought them weren’t willing to hand it over. He went back in and told two of his boxer-friends, “Follow me.” He didn’t explain, just “follow me.” And they did. When those guys saw these three boxers, they stepped back. “There a bunch of coats back there. I didn’t know which one was hers, so I just took them all. It worked out great. I took your Mom with me and each of the two boxers left with one of the other girls.”

But there was still trouble. “Those guys were mad that we had taken their girls and had driven out and stopped along the highway and were all waiting for me. I reached for the glove compartment and got my pistol. Babe (as he sometimes called Mom) looked alarmed. I told her, ‘It isn’t loaded but they won’t know that.’ The guys backed down and we went on through.”

“The next day, when school let out, I was there waiting for her. I had a car and that impressed a girl. I asked if I could take her out that night. I was surprised when she agreed. It was so sweet of her. I had been so mean to her the first time.” Dad had never explained how he was “mean,” but perhaps he had tried to bully her into doing more than she was willing to do. I know Mom was a big fan of the double standard. “The guy should try to get all he can,” she explained. “ That way the girl knows she is attractive to him. Then her job is to say No.”

Mom looked young and was still a kid in a lot of ways. She was full of pranks. “I was at school first thing one morning and, looking out the windowed-door, I saw the principal coming through the snow and, impishly, locked the door on him. Right away he turned red in the face and started steaming. Then I was really afraid to let him in. He started around to the door on the other side of the building, so I ran and locked that door too.” I never heard how that caper turned out.

“I was eighteen going on fourteen,” Mom told me. “There was a little stump in the back yard. Each night I would go out before bedtime and pray, ‘Starlight and star bright, each star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” Now this little girl had a beau who drove a car.

The next Saturday, Dad just showed up at the Young house. Mrs. Young said, “Alleen’s around back.” Dad walked out back. Mom’s family were not farmers – her father ran the general store – but, like many people those days, they had a few animals for family needs. Mom was in her sloppy pants and loose shirt, with hair just pulled back and tucked under a cap -- milking the cow. She was alarmed to see him coming and ran to hide. He caught up with her. “She was mortified, but I thought she looked cute. I offered to finish milking the cow.” Mom knew Dad and his family weren’t farmers, and probably thought of him as something of a city-slicker. “She was surprised that I knew how, but I had had a summer job milking sixteen cows.”

I have heard different versions of what happened next. Mom told me that, on their second or third date, she asked him what his future plans were. “The first thing I’m going to do is marry you.” “I laughed.”

Dad’s mother told me, “We used to sit around the black pot-belly stove in the evening. One night, L.B. sat there the longest time without saying anything, just staring into the fire. I asked, ‘L.B., is something there bothering you?’ ‘I’m afraid I’ve gotten myself in deep trouble.’ I thought he had gotten some girl pregnant. ‘What is it, son?’ ‘I think I’m in love.’” Dad explained, “I had no plans to get married any time soon. I was not nearly finished being single.” The wild life was about to come to an end. He asked Dora Alleen Young, just turned eighteen, to marry him.

Mom asked her mom advice. She had met him. He had always come to the door properly and had brought her home on time. “It’s your decision,” her mom said, “You’re the one who has to live with him.” “Before that,” said Mom, “she had been against every guy who had shown an interest. “One guy, she said, ‘is too hot-tempered – you’ll fight all the time.’ Another ‘is nothing but a cotton-picker, and you will never anything but a cotton-pickers wife’.” So “It’s your decision” was a green light.

Next Mom told her oldest brother’s wife, Willie. “What’s his name,” she asked. “Well,” Mom said, “It’s some initials, L.R. or J.B. or something.” Willie ran back toward the kitchen, yelling, “Mom, Alleen is about to marry some guy and she doesn’t even know his name!”

There was one more hurdle, the formidable John Vernon Young, Mom’s father.

“I should ask your father’s permission to marry you.”

Mom said, “If he says No, I won’t marry you.”

“Then I won’t ask him.”

The first dance had been just before Thanksgiving. Mom’s eighteenth birthday had been December 8. It was now December 21. Dad asked, “What’s your religion?” “Baptist.” Dad found a Baptist minister. He had already gone to bed, but his wife fetched him. He was skeptical. Dad had a reputation for “being wild.” “Do your parents know you’re getting married?” “Yes.” “Are you old enough?” “Yes, she’s eighteen.” “I don’t mean her – you.” Eighteen was old enough for a girl, but 21 was the age for guys. They called his mom, who gave the go-ahead, and they were duly married.

In those days, brides usually said “to honor and obey.” Afterwards, Mom didn’t remember whether she had said the “obey” part, but Dad did. “She would ask, but I would never tell her.”

“I got us a hotel room but the first thing I did was call the gas station across the street from her parents’ house. Her family didn’t have a phone, but the guy at the station would carry messages. I asked him to tell Mrs. Young that her daughter was married. I wanted them to know that their daughter was okay.” Okay, that is, legally and in the sight of God.

Dad, did you have enough money to afford a wife? “Yes, I had a job selling.” He had a car and a job and money in his pocket. Mom thought they were rich. “She saw a dress she liked and asked if she could buy it. I said yes.” Most of her clothes had been homemade hand-me-downs. It was a big thing to have a store-bought dress. “Her friend had found one that looked really good on her, but didn’t have any money. ‘That’s not a problem,’ your Mom told her, ‘my guy has plenty of money. He can buy it for you.’ She asked me if I would, and I said yes.”

I was really surprised at that story. Dad has always been generous, but he knew the value of a dollar. I would have thought this was a place to draw the line and teach Mom about money management. “She was better with money than I was.”

Ten and a half months later, I was born. Mom went back to Turkey to have the baby. There was only one doctor in the county. I was not yet due, and he was off taking care of somebody else, when I came knocking. Country women knew how to deliver babies, so on October 16, 1941, I popped out.

“Your mom was weak and needed rest,” Dad says. “I was sleeping on a cot, so we put you beside me. You were tiny. I was afraid I would roll over and crush you, so I decided I would stay awake all night. I tried but, come morning, I was fast asleep. They said I had not moved a muscle.” Mom felt sufficiently okay to have me the next night. Dad had gotten me through my first great hazard.

At first, the Martin family was a shock for Mom. Her own family was staid, quiet, and reserved. She doesn’t recall her ramrod father ever hugging her, even though she was the baby of the family, with eight brothers and sisters, some grown by the time she was born. Her father may have patted her on the head once. But she knew he loved her. When he got home from the store and hung up his coat, she would run over and rummage through the pockets and, as often as not, find a piece of candy. He would sit in his easy chair, holding his newspaper, looking over his reading glasses at her treasure hunt, smiling to himself.

The Martin family was outgoing, volatile, full of affection and fun and trouble, mildly violent in both love and war. They would grab you and squeeze and pinch. “I could just love you to death,” Grandmother Martin used to tell me. For Mom, it was like going from shuffle board to sky diving.

Dad’s little sis, Wanda, didn’t like his getting married. She was quite a bit younger and, when he was still living at home, she liked to crawl into his bed and feel secure next to big brother. She wasn’t going to be able to do that any more. But Mom took a shine to her right away and was happy to have her hanging out with them.

When I was in junior high, as Wanda was having her first great loves and losses, she spent the summers with us, which was like having a cute, popular older sister. Amazingly, she didn’t mind having me tag along when they went to the roller rink and stuff like that. In fact, it was Wanda who gave Mom the name that stuck. Mom didn’t like the “Dora” part of her name because of the phrase “dumb Dora.” And she had never thought “Alleen” sounded great either. Wanda started calling her “Penny” and that is how the whole world knew her from that day forward.

The other shock for Mom was leaving Turkey, Texas. It was a town so small that they didn’t need a census. When we visited, I would ask my cousin, “What’s the population of Turkey now?” “Well, old man McCartle died. The Paulson’s had twins. Mr. & Mrs. Eulew moved to Dallas, and Maria who worked at the café ran off with a travelling salesman. That makes it 998.” My city-slicker Dad took her to Floydada, a city of 20,000 strangers. She did not know that there were towns where most people were strangers. In Turkey, there was one movie theatre, showing one picture, and everybody in town saw the picture and spent all week talking about it. Dad’s world was not very big at that point, but it was at least twenty times the size of Mom’s.

Of course, the depression came along and times were tough. Some of the best jobs around were with the railroad, if you could get them. Mom and Dad moved to the railway hub of Clovis, New Mexico. There were no jobs, but every single day, Dad went down to the railroad office and filled an application. They hold him the first application was enough, but he insisted on putting a new one in every day and you can bet that, the first job that came open, he got it. At his insistence, I did the same thing as a kid trying to get a job with the newspaper, and it worked for me too.

Dad’s first railroad job was in the roundhouse, which served as R & R for the trains. He would wash them down. Mom worked too. She always preferred activity over inactivity. “I always had more energy than I knew what to do with,” she told me years later. For a time, she scooped ice cream – and got her fill. “I had always liked ice cream until then,” she said. Then – always willing to try anything – she got a job driving a school bus. She was a bit under 5’2” and could barely reach the pedals and still see over the steering wheel. “She looked so cute up there,” said Dad in a typical comment.

They didn’t have a car in those days – I think they had loaned or given it to Dad’s parents – and used a bicycle. Dad would pedal with Mom sitting on the handlebars, holding me. A co-worker saw them. “Well, gol-darn, there goes L.B. Martin -- and he’s got his whole family on that bicycle!”

Somehow they saved enough to buy a little white house. “That was the best financial decision I ever made.” The next time they moved they had some equity. Times were tough and they were poor, but they didn’t intend to stay that way.

Mom loved that little house and they made their first life-long friends there – a couple who lived next door. They would remember how what a kid Mom still was. “She would get us out there to pay hop-scotch or Annie-Annie-Over.” I think the second game is played by throwing a ball over the roof and the person who retrieves it runs around the house and tags the person who threw it. Good times!

But war came. Dad got one break. When told the recruiting officer he wanted the Navy, the guy asked him why. “My mother thinks I’ll get killed if I go into the Army or Marines.” It worked. I have also heard that there were several buses there, designated for different services, and that somehow Dad got on the Navy bus.

Then came Dad’s second break. “I knew how to type. Not many guys did. So I got a job as legal yeoman for Captain’s Court, which handled disciplinary cases. Sometimes I was able to finagle someone out of a scrape. I got some steaks from one of the camp cooks that way.”

Dad sent the rest of the war stationed in San Diego. He and Mom were really missing each other but housing was extremely limited. Finally, he found a place for them, but it didn’t allow kids. She went out to join him, and I was shuffled off to Turkey. My grandparents were really good to me. Grandfather made me a little red wagon that is still one of my most cherished memories. I played with my cousin all the time and life was good.

Maybe it was during this time that Dad’s boxed in the Golden Gloves competition, since I don’t remember anything about it. I have seen the impressive, silky, shining robe, with “L.B. Martin” on the back. Mom saw the fight and hated it. Dad does not have a long reach, and the other guy did, and Dad was hammered until blood was flowing down his face. The umpire stopped the fight, to Mom’s relief, but Dad didn’t like it one bit. Taking a beating was his long suit and he was just wearing the other guy down!

Finally, they found a place that was willing to rent the upstairs apartment to a couple with a child. My parents came to Turkey to get me and I had been having such fun that I didn’t want to go and ran and hid under the bed. My grandfather pulled me out by the leg, gave me a good swat, and sent me along. At that age, about four, I had no idea how this might hurt Mom.

Back in San Diego, my parents got me the cutest little sailor suit – it looked just like Dad’s. Whenever we would go out, I would ask, “Dad, are we wearing our sailor suits or our civvies today?” And I would also dress just like him. What a picture this young family was!

There was a downside for me. There were no kids nearby to play with. So I would wander off to nearby neighborhoods. One time I just followed a big dog wherever it went. My parents would have no idea where to find me. They had no car. Dad would walk the streets in all directions. He must have checked the police station because one time I remember Dad showing up while I was sitting up on the sergeant’s high desk, eating an ice cream cone, and entertaining the cops. It couldn’t have been so grand for Dad, but I don’t recall either of them ever being angry with me about wandering off.

The war came to an end and it was time to go home, but where was home? Dad’s father, who had been a top salesman for the W. T. Raleigh Company, had been appointed regional sales director, based at the headquarters in Memphis. So Dad enrolled in Memphis State College (now University), majoring in business, with minors in history and physical education. He thought he might be a coach, which I thought he would be good at but later he told me, “I would have been a terrible coach. I would coach your Mom in softball and, if I told her how to do something once, I expected her to do it right from then on. I didn’t have the patience you need to be a good coach.” His favorite teacher was Professor Brown. “He could tell all these stories from history like he’d been there.” During these years, Dad wrote a research paper on the war and a play about romantic conflict, and learned all about business.

My parents lived in married student housing which, from my childs-eye view, was great. There were barracks-style wooden buildings in a three-quarters square facing a large field of clover. The kids could play out front, well within view of every apartment.

This was also the scene of one of the greatest tragedies that can come to a couple. A second child had been born, a baby brother to me. He was named Martin Layne Martin, but they called him Butch. Neighbors often baby-sat for one another, as one neighbor was doing for the little 18-week-old while my parents and I went to the fairgrounds. When we returned, the neighbor lady was standing out front, visiting with a friend. Dad went in to check the baby, as Mom talked to the lady. What he discovered was that the infant had managed to roll over to the wall side of the bed and had fallen into the crevice between bed and wall, where it could not breathe. An ambulance was called but it was too late. The infant is buried in Memphis, Tennessee.

After Dad graduated, we moved into a one-room attic apartment in a big house owned by his parents. Those were the days before refrigerators. You kept your food in an ice-box, stocked weekly by a guy who came round in a horse-drawn wagon. Mom made her own margarine and put yellow coloring into it, and rolled Dad’s cigarettes. She didn’t like him smoking and we would put little capsules from a novelty shop that would explode when he lit up. He was not amused. He did quit smoking, years later. “I figured that some day a doctor was going to tell me I had to quit, and that might be the worst time to do it.”

Dad started his first business – the Southwest Products Company. As far as I know, its only product was a miracle hand-washer called Cream Skin Shampoo. No matter how grimy your hands were, a dab of this lotion would just roll the dirt off. He sold it door to door, mainly in black neighborhoods. Sometimes I would go with him. He would park in the middle of the block, and I would sit out on the fender and talk with the little kids who would gather around. I could see him at the door, demonstrating the product. Like those vacuum cleaner commercials you see, the demonstration was the key. You would see the amazed look on the hands of the hoped-for customers.

Meanwhile, Mom got a job at Sears. They were always a team, trying to make a better life for themselves. At the end of the day, Dad and I would wait in the car for her to get off work while we listened to the radio. There were great programs back then. “From out of the pages of history come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver,” beating in rhythm to William Tell Overture. Then there was the creaking door of “Inner Sanctum.” “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man? The Shadow knows …” One program was called “Mr. President.” Each segment would dramatize an episode in American history – “Mr. President, the French have offered to sell Louisiana” -- and they didn’t tell you which president it was until the end. Dad had studied American history, and he and I (as I imagined) would figure it out.

Evidently, there were not enough dirty hands in Memphis, because not enough people were buying Cream Skin Shampoo. So Dad started his second business, the LaKay Company, a line of cosmetics also sold door to door. Dad always went all out when he set out to do something but, in spite of that, LaKay never really took off.

Anyway, Mom and Dad started thinking about California. They had loved the climate there, and people had told them that Pasadena was the place to be. Like Oklahomans fleeing the Dust Bowl, they stacked all their worldly goods on top of the car and headed west. They were passing through Riverside – I remember the sign at the city limits “pop. 47,000” – and found it so charming they forgot all about Pasadena.

In the 1950s, Riverside was a city of orange groves, whose fragrance perfumed the whole town. They got a two-story apartment with gravel walkways in an older neighborhood. The people who owned the complex didn’t want kids there but Mom told them I was well-behaved and they gave in.

Dad needed a job fast. He had a little seniority with the railroad and that came in handy. There was an opening in Oceanside, too far to commute but close enough to come home on weekends.

My most vivid memory of that period was when Mom had an appendicitis attack. Dad was in Oceanside and she started having acute pains. She sent me to find neighbors to help. Fortunately, they got her to the hospital in time, and she recovered just fine.

After a year or so, Dad was able to transfer to the Santa Fe station in Riverside. The job had some perks. Mom always missed her family in Texas, and every couple of years they would drive home, sometimes all the way through Arkansas to visit Aunt Tennie and her husband, and then to Memphis. Now Dad accrued something like frequent flyer mileage, and we took the train instead. Towns like Flagstaff and Albuquerque became familiar. The other perk was that employees got to take home any packages damaged in transport. I remember a cornucopia of Campbell’s soup and a life-time supply of Colgate toothpaste.

Dad’s parents had always believed in real estate, and Dad’s experience with the house in Clovis confirmed that. As soon as they were able, they bought a house on Lassen Court, in a new development in Magnolia Center, a small community at the edge of Riverside. Every house had a newly planted bottle tree out front, and the houses for the next section had not been built yet. On Central Avenue, there was a huge field of alfalfa, with some old farm buildings on it. In a few years, it would be a major shopping center, anchored by the Harris Co.

Mom got a job at the Riverside National Bank, later bought by Security National, at the corner of Central and Brockton. She started as a bank teller but was so good with people that they had her handle new accounts, customer service, and the safe deposit boxes. She was so attractive and popular that, to promote the bank, they put her picture on billboards all around the county.

Dad never liked working for the railroad. “No matter how good a job you do, you only get promoted through seniority,” he explained. So he went back to selling, and this time it was a product he could really relate to – advertising specialties, pens and calendars and other give-aways that remind customers of your business and build their loyalty. He started selling for the Vernon Company, based in Newton, Iowa.

Dad is a quiet guy, not the glad-hand you think of salesmen as being. But he is a man you can trust. And he had a philosophy of selling. “Sell something you believe in, something you think he needs. When I call on a new customer, I am there to help him.” Sometimes, a customer might be willing to buy, say, a thousand calendars. “But, if you think he only needs 500, tell him that. Never sell a customer more than he needs.”

A couple of times, in my college years, I got part-time jobs selling encyclopedias or home installation. Dad had contempt for one-time selling because, once you talk the person into buying, you walk away. And, as a business, you are not building anything. If you do the kind of selling where you build up a lasting relationship, then, if you take good care of them, they will order from you year in and year out. Dad would end up selling to the sons, sometimes even the grandsons, of his original customers.

Dad had always preferred being in business for himself and, when a guy he didn’t respect became the regional sales manager, it was time for him to go on his own. He started the L. B. Martin Company, “Prestige Advertising Specialties.” Most of his Vernon Company customers stayed with him, but it was tough sledding. With any kind of selling, you always start with “cold turkey” calls – visiting potential customers with whom you have no prior relationship or reputation. Most of them have never given two minutes thought to whether they should give out pens or calendars or some other items that will put their ad in customers’ homes or pockets – where they and others will see them during the course of the year. You have to explain that this is what their business needs, and that it is affordable.

The other big challenge in the first year was financial. Now that Dad was in business for himself, he dealt directly with the suppliers and had to pay them in advance. The more sales Dad got, the more he had to shell out to the suppliers as the year went on. Customers don’t pay for items until after they are shipped at the end of the year. So debt mounted. The more he sold, the more he had to borrow from the bank. He had excellent credit and was listed in Dunn & Bradstreet, but eventually the loan officer got cold feet and turned Dad down.

“Your Dad was so angry, he almost climbed over the desk and throttled the guy,” Mom told me later. I don’t recall how he finally covered it, but he was able to keep making sales. Through thick and thin, Dad has always slept well but he told me, “This was one of the few times in my life that I had trouble sleeping. I just thought that, if something happened to me, I would leave Penny with all that debt.”

That very year, I had gone off to graduate school, the University of Chicago. It was very expensive, and Dad was paying. I was oblivious to his financial situation and he never let on. Dad had always been so generous, I didn’t even think about it. Sometimes, when I got to high school, I went to events around the state and needed some money. Dad always gave me more than enough. I had forgotten this, but he told me recently, “When you’d get back, you would always return what you didn’t need.”

Mom was helping Dad with all the paperwork. At the bank, she had risen to positions of regional responsibility. This high-school drop-out was in line to become a bank vice president. But Dad told her, “Babe, I can’t do this alone. I have to have you help me.” They expanded the garage and created an office and a storage area for samples and such. “I knew this other salesman who had gone into business for himself. The first thing he did was rent a big office for himself. That was a mistake. You need low overhead.”

The L. B. Martin Company survived the critical first year and, after a time, Dad got some other guys selling for him – not many, a half dozen or so. “I never wanted the business to get too big, because then I would have to spend all my time running it, and wouldn’t have time to sell, which I enjoyed.” He would hold periodic sales meetings with the guys, and I visited one. They sat around in a semi-circle, but one chair – a captain’s chair – was reserved for the guy with the top sales for the quarter.

Dad sold all over Riverside and Imperial counties, and would frequently be out of town Monday through Thursday, doing office work on Friday and Saturday. Of course, Mom would miss him those days but she told me, “He sent me a love poem every day.” She showed me a basket full of them. I read some – some are romantic, some are funny, and some probably made Mom blush.

Dad’s father had retired from the Raleigh Company, but Dad persuaded him to come out of retirement and sell for the L. B. Martin Company. He was happy to be in the saddle again and did a bang-up job. Dad took no company cut from his sales, but didn’t tell Granddad that.

Meanwhile, Mom had a secret plan. She Mom had stashed away $750 from her grocery money and found a piece out property way out on the edge of town – it had a septic tank – which could be bought for $1000 down. I had saved $250 from my paper route – and so we bought the place and presented to Dad as a surprise.

Later they sold the septic-tank place and bought a solid but run-down duplex downtown. We put a lot of sweat-equity into it one summer. It really shined by the time we were through with it. Later Dad traded up for a more modern triplex. And, eventually, he used equity from that one to buy an apartment building with about 19 units, and added a second apartment building later.

“That’s my retirement plan,” he would say. He didn’t have a 401K and never sought deferred-tax investments. “I’m optimistic enough to think that I am in a lower tax bracket now than I will be in the future.”

Mom had always had a dozen balls in the air. She would take on projects for non-profit organizations, like the Assistance League. When she took over the thrift store, she got guys to donate new shelves and flooring and paint, and presented the clothing and other goods more attractively, and sold more and better goods to people who needed them.

When Mom took over League fund-raising one year, she put on a racquetball tournament, even though she had never before seen it played. She got prizes donated – not piddly things like pizza coupons, but big items like pianos and refrigerators. She broke the record for fund-raising.

And when she took on the job of press secretary, the events reporter at the Riverside Press-Enterprise said, “Penny Martin is the best press secretary the Assistance League ever had – or ever will have!” Dad was always drafted into Number One assistant in everything Mom did. “With Penny, every day was an adventure.”

Dad has always had excellent health, and Mom was a bundle of energy, but in her fifties, she was struck hard with rheumatoid arthritis. She was bed-ridden and had to take 24 aspirin a day to keep down the inflammation. She tackled her own illness with the same ingenuity and determination with which she had always done everything. She learned all she could from both standard medicine and alternatives. She tried every remedy, no matter how unpleasant, in hopes one of them would work. Dad was side-by-side her partner in all this. For a time, he was driving into Los Angeles three times a week to get certain foods she was supposed to eat fresh. During one period, he would make eight vegetable smoothies a day for her. My Mom said, “You must hate making all those smoothies.” “I don’t know,” Dad said. “I don’t ask myself whether I like it. I just do it.”

Eventually Mom did beat the arthritis, and was back to her unending adventures – she was teaching line-dancing in her seventies – with Dad by her side in all her projects. His business was doing well and the apartments provided some security. Dad started thinking that the two of them would really enjoy a nicer home. Without telling her, he secretly started looking, and he found the place of his dreams – on San Jacinto Drive, right on the golf course. Mom always enjoyed looking at houses, so he suggested one Sunday that they check out some houses for sale. Still not saying anything, he took her to the dream house. She loved it, but said they should see what else is on the market. “Nothing else compared,” Dad said. He negotiated and got a good price. “I kept telling them they had to lower the price. I’d complain, ‘It doesn’t even have a swimming pool.’ He didn’t tell them that he wouldn’t take a swimming pool if you gave it to him. It was a lovely house, which Mom fixed up beautifully, and they thoroughly enjoyed living there.

Mom and Dad had a big 50th anniversary event at the Victoria Country Club. Friends and relatives came from all over. Dad used to talk about a friend from his single days named Johnston. He was a smooth talker. “We’d be driving along and see a couple of girls walking down the block. Johnston would hop out and start talking with them, and by the time they got to the end of the block, he would just scoop them into the car.” He hadn’t seen Johnston for many a year, but his friend showed up – driving exactly the same model gold Cadillac as Dad!

At the evening event, I was m.c., and Dad talked about what an adventure it had been to live with Mom. He talked about what an adventure life with Mom was, and said there was one thing he was especially grateful for – “She never complained about money. And there were some really lean years!”

Mom and Dad started seeing the world – a cruise to Hawaii, and around the Mediterranean, and along the coast of Asia. On their final trip – to Alaska – everybody on board got ill. Mom came down with poliomyositis, an auto-immune disease. Perhaps Mom’s bout of rheumatoid arthritis had given her a vulnerability.

Mom was hypersensitive to the standard medications and had to take ones with dreadful side-effects. Year by year, one complication after another developed. Mom studied every angle of this rather rare disease – there were only two other cases in the state of California. Eventually, she knew more about it than her doctors, who had never treated a case before. Once again, she tried everything, but this time nothing helped.

“I didn’t want to leave your Mom to go out selling anymore,” Dad told me. “She might need me.” So, having worked until nearly the age of eighty, Dad sold his business. I knew that he would have loved it if I had taken over the business and kept it going but, in this way and others, he always let me live my own life and do what I most enjoyed. That business wasn’t the right thing for me, but it certainly had been for him. “I still dream about calling on customers.”

Mom’s health declined steadily but, thankfully, Dad’s health was still good and enabled him to keep taking care of her. She had a great physical constitution, and it took years for her many afflictions to finally bring her down. As she approached her nineties, she felt crummy every day but, blessedly, was not in pain and continued to have a great will to live.

Finally, Mom had to be hospitalized, though there was little that could be done for her. When the nurses came to send visitors away, Dad refused to leave. He spend day and night in her room, sleeping in the chair. Eventually, they brought in a cot for him.

Finally, her body started closing down, and she was brought home for hospice care. Good friends, Bill and Maxine Doles, came over and sang hymns to her, which was a great comfort. At last, she seemed at peace with death, and passed away quietly.

Mom had asked that I make remarks at the graveside service. I talked about how this small town girl had married a “wild” nineteen-year-old L. B. – what are his initials, again? – Martin. She went on to live an amazing, improbable life, a life beyond anything she could have dreamt of. In the very depth of her afflictions, she told me, remarkably, “Nobody should feel sorry for me. I have had a wonderful life.” That was the theme of her life, and it was Dad who made that possible and shared it with her – two great lovers.

“I could have looked the whole world over, and not found another L. B. Martin,” she used to say. After her passing, Dad summed it up: “We were together for 67 years. And it wasn’t nearly long enough.”

Years before, the two of them would go out to the Galleria to walk. They got to know a group that included Dale and Evie Casados. Mom had told them that, when she passed away, to get Dad out there walking again. “I used to have one boss,” Dad says, “Now I have a bunch of them.” They also used to go to Tai Chi, led by Susan, whom he calls simply the Pretty Lady, and he resumed that as well. A smile from a pretty girl still makes his day.

Beside his rock-solid character, Dad’s strongest trait is good judgment and what I sometimes call “life wisdom.” He and Mom, planning ahead, had once checked various retirement and had liked Olive Grove (now Wellbrook) best. I wanted to see it, so we stopped by one day. To my amazement, he told the girl at the desk, “I have really enjoyed where I am living now but it is time to move, and then I will enjoy it here.” He knew it was time to move, and they had a very nice apartment available.

Dad turned 93 on May 22, 2014, still on his feet and in good health. His only complaint is about the folks at the retirement home. “There are just a bunch of old folks here.” Evidently, Dad still isn’t one of them.

Arrangements under the direction of Acheson & Graham Garden of Prayer Mortuary, Riverside, CA.