| 1937 | I was born in St. Anne's Hospital on Chicago's west side toward the end of the Depression. My Father was a Naprapath (drugless healing by ligamental adjustment, apparently a Chicago thing) in private practice, but he didn't deliver babies. I appeared in the early morning of April 3, roughly a month before the Hindenburg went down in New Jersey (no causal relationship between the two events has been shown to exist.) |  |
| 1940 | The family moves to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where my Father has found a job in a pump factory. I do not think it was as a Naprapath. Our neighborhood seemed childless (birthrates were low during the Depression), but there was a pie bakery around the block; not until I entered the first grade did I have regular contact with other children, and by then it may have been too late. Fort Wayne was the home of another isolate, John Chapman, known as "Johnny Appleseed", (who knew that he had any home at all? I thought he just wandered around.) |  |
| 1941 | The family moves to Washington State in June, towing a trailer loaded with our meagre possessions, a lá Grapes of Wrath, the length of Route 30. My Father has a job at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyards (known for its Hammerhead Crane at the right) in Bremerton as an electrician. After a couple of weeks in a trailer park in Seattle (Dad commuting by ferry), we find a small house to rent on the shore of Hood Canal. There were no other children around--the area was a haven for retired people, like Mrs. Reynolds our landlady--so I was on my own. The wonderful thing about living on a beach is that you can be on your own at age 4: you can't get lost. There are only two ways to go; whichever one you choose, you get back home by turning around and walking the same distance as you did on your outbound trip. Hood Canal ("canal" is an 18th century spelling for "channel"; it is really a fjord) has gravel beaches for the most part; back then, when you encoundered a wet spot in the gravel, you could scoop a hole in it, wait a minute, and drink. The wet spots were springs of delicious water; today, they are more likely to be places downhill from somebody's septic tank. Mostly, I only came home when hungry. People do not seem to allow their children to do this any more. |   |
| 1941 | The Japs (they were not called "Japanese" until well after the War) create the Day that Shall Live in Infamy by attacking Pearl Harbor. We got the news on our radio. A week later, I was found mixing "Jap poison" on the beach. As I never found a Jap willing to make the attempt, its efficacy remains unknown. |  |
| 1943 | We move to our own, if uncompleted, house on the hill and I begin first grade under Mrs. McGlassen. | |
| 1948 | My parents attempt divorce; living with my Father, I resolve to learn to cook in order to avoid that branch of incompetence. Parents reconcile after a couple of months. |  |
| 1949 | April 11, little sister Nancy born. I am promoted to babysitter. | |
| 1951 | An eventful year. Mother, Sister, and I travel to Chicago to show off Sister and to see relatives, none of whom I remember; I see my first professional theatre, South Pacific with Richard Eastham and Janet Blair (first road company) at the Mark Goodman Theatre. My Father quits government work (rife, at that time, with RIFs) and opens an electric shop. I begin my first real job as an apprentice printer at the Silverdale Breeze. I get a dollar an hour (very good for a 14-year old then) and learn a great deal that I have never forgotten, both about printing and the joy of working with really good people. |  |
| 1955 | I graduate from Central Kitsap High School in June and in September enter Western Washington State College of Education in Bellingham. I wanted to teach, a profession my Father dismissed as that of being a "ball-bearing schoolmarm". My freshman year was not stellar. |  |
| 1956 | I joined the U.S. Army Alaskan Communication System on a 3-year enlistment. The adventures (or lack thereof) I experienced in the frozen north are recounted in A Tour of Duty, the very ebook this website is designed to promote. What a lucky coincidence! |  |
| 1959 | I get out of the Army and complete a sophomore year at Olympic Junior College in Bremerton. For the first and only time in my life, I rack up a staight 4.0 average for the year: I was really glad to be out of the Army, and I had perhaps grown up a bit. At this school I got some of the best advice I have ever had: I wanted to teach, but did not know whether to get a BA in English, then work at a teaching credential, or a BS in Ed with a major area in English. One of the Lit guys at Olympic suggested that I think of all the faculty members I found interesting and all I found dull, then look them up in the catalogue to see what sort of degrees each had. The dullards were, without exception, education majors. Great advice, because he did not tell me, he pointed me toward the evidence. |  |
| 1960 | I
return to Western Washington State College in Bellingham
to complete my degree. I get a job as a picket for the
retail clerk's union and do most of my reading and
writing while walking up and down the same sidewalk
(pickets had to keep moving or were subject to arrest for
loitering). On rainy days (about 180 per year on average
in Washington), I held the book under the plastic sleeve
from a 12-inch LP (long-playing record). When I walked
into stores around town, I was recognized as "the
reading picket," and when I wrote term papers using a
clipboard, nervous union members kept approaching me to
ask whether I were taking down license numbers. During this time, I did my first musical, the role of Peacham in Gay's The Beggar's Opera, a show I much prefer to the Brecht rip-off. At the beginning of rehearsals, I was told by the music director that my singing style was passé: I enunciated my consonants. I was delighted to learn that I actually had a singing style. When the show opened, we got high praise from the reviewers for the fact that they were able to understand the words we were singing. There is some value in consonants after all! |
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| 1961 | At the importuning of Richard, I marry. Richard
is a great guy, whose acquaintance I have only recently
been remaking. I do a series of six plays under a much older great guy, Ralph Carter, at both WWSC and the Bellingham Theatre Guild, whose building was once owned by Aimee ("pin your contributions to the ropes") Semple McPherson. We started together with Tartuffe and concluded with the brilliant Adam the Creator by Karel Capek (the man who gave the word "robot" to the English language). Ralph went on to head the Theatre Department at Johnson State College in Vermont, just around the mountain from Stowe. |
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| 1962 | I receive the BA in English from WWSC. |  |
| 1963 | I am offered a Teaching Assistantship at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville; I take it and learn several things: semesters contain more books than quarters, in grad school one cannot survive the same number of hours that one took as an undergrad, teaching takes more time than I expected, and I was actually a pretty good teacher. Leo Van Scyoc, head of the freshman English program, would call in a batch of your graded themes and read them, along with your comments, and render judgment: I was grading a bit too high (no student ever told me this), but my students were working well for me and my comments showed that I was working well for them. A feel-good moment, despite the fact that I was putting in seven 18-hour days per week to keep up with it all. |  |
| 1964 | I get a divorce and lose Richard. This loss was more painful than I have ever allowed myself to realize. | |
| 1965 | I
marry Ann Aves, who isn't an artist yet, but has great
potential. Out of a crop of 24 candidates halved and halved again by a rigorous examination process, I am one of 6 to receive the MA in English. I find work as a waiter (at The Coachman, Fayetteville's finest steakhouse--though I pick up a lot of tips by filleting broiled trout) until the following fall, when I get an instructorship at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. |
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| 1965 | At NIU I feel that I have finally arrived: I am a
professional person at a real college, with a princely
salary of $9,500 per year, office space (and office
hours), and the possibility of settling in at a career. My
office mate, Richard Storinger, is a Chicago boy who has
just finished his MA at the University of Washington: we
take to each other immediately. Coming from Arkansas, where the students tended to be pretty rural, I look forward to the more urbanized types that would doubtless populate my classroom. It is something of a shock to discover that the kids in Fayetteville were in some ways more sophisticated than the suburbanites. Country people see some real things--life, death, cattle shagging, whatever--while suburban ones seem to be more insulated from such disturbances. It makes a difference in your mind set. |
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| 1967 | My parents succeed at the divorce they attempted 19 years earlier. Later that same year, my Mother dies, not of a broken, but of a rheumatic, heart. Little Sister is 18 and I mistakenly imagine her to be in need of someone to function in loco parentis; I have a nostalgia for home, and Richard lives with his Mum in the State of Washington, fairly nearby: like an idiot, I resign my instructorship effective the end of the school year. |  |
| 1968 | We retrace the Trek of 1941 down Route 30 from Illinois to Washington with two cars, two dogs, and two cats to begin 3 years of underemployment. Olympic College, where there were some possibilities, had just had other state two-year colleges open in its catchment area: its enrollment dropped from 4,000 to 1,000, and over half of its faculty (but less than a quarter of its administrators) had been let go. I get some adjunct classes in the evening and get substitute teaching gigs in high schools and junior highs at Silverdale and Bremerton. |  |
| 1970 | Enough being enough, I give up on the home in the
woods and get a teaching fellowship at Kent State University. I accept
their offer in April, we arrive in June, and in May
the place becomes famous. Despite all that, the KSU was good for me, with some sharp minded teachers and opportunities to create and teach an honors writing course and to help set up and run a Writing Clinic. |
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| 1974 | I leave Kent State ABD, one of the few to get a teaching job. It is at Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, Mississippi. It is only later that I learn the average reading rate for rising juniors is at the sixth grade level. My first stop on campus was at the library, where I discover that the air conditioning had been out for several weeks, and all the books were moldy. That was something of a high point of my experience at Valley. |  |
| 1975 | I defend my dissertation Studies Toward an Edition of the North Briton (available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan): this is Hogarth's view of the two authors, John Wilkes and Charles Churchill (Hogarth was a Tory satirist, they were Whigs); Wilkes is on the left, Churchill (the Bruiser, as a bear with ecclesiastical bands) to the right. The North Briton was ordered burned by the common hangman and Wilkes put under a sentence of Outlawry for Number 45's reflections upon King George III; the Outlaw was very popular in this country--Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, several counties, and the son of Junius Brutus Booth, Sr. were named after him. |  |
| 1976 | In this year, I did all the fiddles with the
dissertation (still available from University Microfilms
of Ann Arbor Michigan), got it professionally typed, and
turned it in to receive the PhD in 18th Century British
Literature. I did not go to the ceremony. I get my first radio job, on WGRM-AM in Greenwood, Mississippi. |
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| 1977 | Since I try to hold students at Valley to the
same standards I have held students elsewhere, the
dropout/failure rate in my classes is high (I find the
view that a good school is one that graduates the most
students an abomination: I believe a good school is one
whose graduates do reasonably well at the next level,
whatever that level may be). I am sacked for
insubordination. I get a job at Richard Bland College, a two-year branch of William and Mary in Petersburg, Virginia (best known for the Crater blasted during the seige at the end of the Civil War: shown is the entrance of the mine that made it.) |  |
| 1980 | At Richard Bland, I teach English and speech courses and produce and direct five plays in the Barn Theatre. Faced with declining enrollment, the administration tells us "pass everyone--we need the money from the state legislature." Since I regard this policy as a swindle of the students, I do not participate. Like the mine in 1865, I am fired. This creates a great depression. With puddles in it. |  |
| 1981 | Since I still have the typewriter on which I finished my dissertation, and since I cannot bear trying to find another teaching job, I start a business as a freelance writer in Richmond, Virginia. I do copy for the American Historical Foundation, which at that time was selling commemorative editions of the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife and just getting into firearms. I get some other clients in the small ad agencies, and finally a major one with the PR group of the Martin Agency. |  |
| 1983 | I get my first computer, the Epson QX-10, the finest CP/M machine ever made. The IBM XT was available, but cost $1800 more and was not as useful. The bundled Valdocs software on the Epson could handle six files at once, copying and pasting between them, a capability other word processing programs did not attain for nearly a decade. I offered to submit copy on disk to the Martin Agency, but it would have cost them $5000 to get a floppy drive attached to their mainframe, so they thought it cheaper to get it on paper for one of the "girls" to type up. So much for the greater efficiencies of computerization. |  |
| 1990 | As the Hubble went up, my grosses went down because of the recession--to about 25% of what they had been. I join a testing company, for which I design a database that generates reports to state agencies and set up a profitable test training program. After a couple of years, I am promoted to regional manager for Maryland. A few months later, the company acquires another that overlaps the Maryland region, and I am downsized. So much for private industry. |  |
| 1994 | I join the VA as a technical writer/editor for the Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development published in Baltimore. I enjoy the work, but am a little astonished at the procedures I find: while editing articles, any queries to the author are written in green ink on the hard copy of the MS. Once the matter is typeset, these queries are copied in green ink on the galleys, and the galleys are then sent to the author for correction. I found it easier simply to email the author with questions or suggested rewrites to clear ambiguities: usually I would have the answer or approval the same afternoon, so the files sent out for typesetting no longer had queries. Since corrections made to set matter then cost something like $10 per line (the altered line itself and every line affected by that alteration), this saved the taxpayers quite a lot of money, but got me in trouble with the Editor. She thought that she was the only one exalted enough to have direct communications with authors. In a private meeting with me, her supervisor told me to keep on doing what I had been doing, but very quietly. |  |
| 2000 | I transfer to the Office of the Medical Inspector
in VA's central office, two blocks north of the White
House. The upside is promotion; the downside is working in
DC, an unreal city occupied only by the very rich and the
very poor: everyone else leaves at 5:00. But the office is
a good one, in which I work with docs and nurses for the
most part in an effort that only the Veterans Health
Administration of all U.S. hospital chains undertakes:
structured, system-wide quality improvement. In fairness,
it must be noted that some private chains are studying our
methods with a view toward adopting them. Another downside since 9/11 is that we work very close to a potential ground zero. Luckily, we have the crack Department of Homeland Security to keep us safe. We are told that our best bet, in event of disaster, is to start walking home. Home is 22 miles up Route 1, but I am confident that I can make it. |
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| 2006 | For over 20 years, my wife Ann Aves Martin has been painting, first in Richmond, Virginia, and then in Maryland at studios in Savage Mill and later at the Howard County Center for the Arts. At the same time, she is becoming increasingly crippled by osteoarthritis, relying on an electric wheelchair and the Howard County buses for the disabled to get from home to studio to paint her landscapes and still lifes like Dancing Beans at the right. In February she has a "spell" of slurred speech that may have been a small stroke; by the time the EMTs arrived, she was back to normal. Her strength begins to decline noticeably; in March she is hospitalized for a fall and found to also have an infection. In April, she comes home to a hospital bed; no longer able to transfer to a wheelchair, she is entirely bedfast. She can no longer paint. |  |
| 2007 | In March, Ann has yet another infection (the bedfast are subject to them); this one requires hospitalization. The infection is cleared after several courses of IV antibiotics, but her mental abilities are compromised; after 3 weeks in hospital, she enters hospice care, where she dies April 15, 2007. I am terribly glad that she is no longer in pain, and I miss her. She taught me how to see the world and she brightened my life. |  |