Word: martin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Glenn's father liked it better when the Martins moved to Santa Ana, Calif, and Glenn began making $3,000 to $4,000 a year selling Fords and Maxwells. When Glenn began making gliders in his garage, Father Martin's eyebrows raised. When Glenn rented an abandoned Methodist church, locked the doors, painted the windows and, with a whittled propeller and a Ford Model N motor, began to construct an airplane, his alarmed father thought Glenn had taken leave of his senses...
...Mother Martin did not. She used to carry the coal-oil lamp around at night while Glenn climbed about his contraption, gluing fabric on the wings, varnishing the struts...
Early Days. In the early, rough-&-tumble days of flying Glenn Martin was an incongruous figure. Solemn as a preacher, he dressed in black with a tall white collar, wore a businesslike helmet when he flew. Other pinfeather fliers, who turned their checkered caps backward when they climbed into their planes, called him "The Dude...
...while most of the other fliers just flew, Glenn Martin barnstormed to find out how to make better flying machines. Almost as soon as he learned to fly he began manufacturing planes in Santa Ana. He opened a factory in Los Angeles in 1912, from which he sold planes to the U. S. Army, still one of his best customers. For seven years, sobersided Martin, half pilot, half industrialist, whizzed around the country, flying to finance manufacturing...
...records, an altitude mark for hydroplanes (4,400 feet) in 1912, the longest overwater hop (from Newport Beach, Calif. 28 miles to Catalina Island) in the same year. Because aviators were few, the return was handsome. Most of it went into the factory. Because publicity for Martin-and he got plenty-was publicity for Martin planes, the business flourished. Even Father Martin (who died in 1935) admitted that Glenn had been on the right track all along...