Page 258 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 251
“One morning, when I was about 10, I got up and noticed two cocktail coasters my parents brought home the night before. I looked closer and saw that they’d been autographed by Johnny Marcum and Jimmie Foxx. Foxx! He was like God to me because the (Philadelphia) Athletics were my team. I’ve never forgotten what a thrill that was, or the thrill I later felt when I stood outside Shibe Park and collected the rst one on my own from Skeeter Newsome.”8
Martin enrolled at Duke University in 1941 and re- membered a more innocent time. “ e Depression was over and we were pretty much just concerned with growing up and enjoying ourselves. None of us had much interest in what was happening outside our own little worlds -but, man, we sure grew up in a hurry.”
On December 7 Martin had taken his girlfriend to a movie and when he returned to the dorm he saw “everyone clustered around a radio. One guy turned to me and said, ‘Isn’t it awful what the Japanese did? ey bombed Pearl Harbor!’”9
Martin responded, “‘Pearl Harbor? at’s in the Hawaiian islands, isn’t it?’ I gured it was a possession of ours, but what did it mean? I didn’t know. We were just kids, away from home at a big university, with a football team on its way to the Rose Bowl, and the most important thing in the world was having a date for the Saturday night dance. I guess you could say we were kind of dumb.”10
Martin enlisted in the US Marines in 1942, and later fought with the 4th Marine Division at the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945. “I’m not one of the guys you see raising the ag. I don’t think we were there thirty minutes before we came upon a shell-hole. I looked in and saw it lled with dead Marines; I mean blown-up Marines, with entrails and ... oh God, I’d never seen anything like that before. en I started looking around and pretty soon death got so common.”11
On Day 26 of the campaign they rejoiced when word of US victory came. Martin rejoiced, “ e ag was ying on Mount Suribachi—our ag! What a feeling!”12
Martin graduated from Duke in 1948 with a degree in English. He worked in advertising in New York City, but Madison Avenue was de nitely not for him, and a stint at the Dell Publishing Company in Washington D.C.,13 also unful lling.
en Martin called old friend Bob Wol , a former classmate at Duke who had helped him with his on-air delivery at the campus radio station.14 Wol was now the TV voice of the Washington Senators.
WolfrememberedMartin.“Hetoldmethathispresent job was trying to get drug stores and supermarkets to carry paperback books, but what he really wanted to do was test himself in sportscasting. I had him read for me. He sounded pleasant, low key, smooth — good enough to get a start somewhere. I recommended he try WINX radio in Washington. ... He could work on weekends, ll in on vacations, and be on call if a bigger position opened up.”15
WINX, located in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, provided valuable broadcasting experience for Martin. “I went to Rockville and did it all on the ground oor — news, commercials, afternoon shows, playing hillbilly music.”16
Martin then spent 21⁄2 years announcing for WFRC radio in Athens, Georgia. “Nicest 21⁄2 years I ever spent anywhere,” he recalled. “Did all kinds of high school sports, women’s sports. College baseball games. A young man named Francis Tarkenton was at Georgia then — quarterback on the football team, pitcher on the baseball team, point guard on the basketball team. I saw him strike out 20 guys in a baseball game once. I broadcast the game, in fact.”17
In the late 1940s Martin met Barbara Rolley, and the two were married in 1951.18
In 1956 Martin became the play-by-play announcer on WCHS radio for the Charleston (West Virginia) Senators, a Triple-A a liate of the Detroit Tigers in the American Association. Martin broadcast from a tiny booth at Watt Powell Park.19 When Charleston was on the road, he announced play-by-play through wire re-creation. “Sometimes,” he recalled, “the man