The Martin family has been long-time friends with the Maginity family. Bob Martin and my dad, Ward Maginity, made VW dune buggies and ran them all over the Sleeping Bear dunes when it was just a state park. Those were some fun days!
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The photo with the dog on the board is Bob working on a truck with his dog Buddy acting as the jack.
The dog would sit on the board until Bob told him to move. |
Bob’s dad was called William but his name was Raleigh. He was a tiny fellow. Bob was skinny but made of steel. I poured coffee for him and the rest of the coffee guys at the Brookside for many years. Man of few words, Bob Martin was.
Bob was born in 1924 to Raleigh and his first wife, Ethyl
Hency Martin. He lived on US 31 with his parents for the first few years of his life until they divorced. Until the age of five, he lived with his mother behind the sheriff’s department in Beulah and then moved back to South Benzonia until he was fifteen.
At the age of fifteen, Bob and a friend when hoboing around
the United States on freight trains. I wish he had kept a journal of those days! Jumping trains to where ever they ended up, scratching up work where ever they landed. What an adventure! But he was arrested for stealing bread in Illinois, so he came back up north, back home.
My family sometimes talks of having wheels in our butts.
There is restlessness, a need to be on the road, on the go. Bob had this need.
When he got home he got a truck driving job with Parker Motor Frieght, but six months later he and his father Raliegh went down to Florida. They stayed down there for six months.
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| The bridge in this photo may or may not be the bridge in the story. |
Bob enlisted in the US Army and was in the Army Corps of
Engineers from 1942 through 1946. He was in Germany and saw action. One of the favorite stories Tom has told me about Bob is this:
Bob’s corps was building a bridge. Bob had earned the name
of “Slow Bob” from going about his work in a steady way. As they were working on this bridge, though, a German fighter plane came over them and strafed the bridge. Bob was the first to make it to the fox hole. When his CO said to him, “Bob, I have never seen you move so fast before!” Bob answered “Well, I have never been shot at before!”
When Bob’s unit was scrounging for food in France during the
war, they came upon an abandoned farm that still had a cow on it. They were chasing the cow around trying to kill it so they could butcher it for food, and it ran into the farm house. They killed it and ended up butchering it out on the bed in the house.
Bob and another guy were on patrol and ended up behind enemy lines. They heard a German patrol coming, a two-man patrol. They hid under a truck until the Germans went past. They climbed out and killed the two men with their bayonets.
Bob came home from the war and married Beverly Oligney, the love of his life. The two of them had some adventures of their own, from raising their four children Deb, Pat, Robin, and Tom; to going rattlesnake hunting down in Florida…with 22 caliber pistols!
