Always Building

Retired technology professor John Martin loves construction, and while he might not have thought about it at the time, he was a builder of what became Georgia Southern’s School of Technology, now part of the Allen E. Paulson College of Science and Technology.

Martin’s ties to the University go far beyond his 28 years as a professor. He is a 1950 graduate of Georgia Teachers College whose family holds tri-generational alumni status. Both his son, John, and daughter, Rebecca, are graduates, as is his grandson, John Jr. His granddaughter Kate is a Georgia Southern junior.

The professor began his life in the town of Argyle, Ga. His father’s company logged and manufactured structural timbers for the railroad. Like most of his generation, the Great Depression left an indelible impression on his upbringing.

“Those were hard times,” he remembered. “A nickel was hard to come by.” He went to work for his father as a teenager, cutting timber in the heart of the Okefenokee Swamp. “It was sort of a circle that we made,” he said. “It was very much the norm in the timber business – you would cut out your area of timber and then, when it all was gone, you would pick up and leave.”

When the government halted logging in the Okefenokee, the operation moved to the pine groves near Glennville, Ga. Then World War II intervened.

After military service as a medic, Martin enrolled at Georgia Teachers College. With the help of the GI Bill, he earned his undergraduate degree and taught in Sylvania and Glennville. When he joined the faculty of Marvin Pittman Laboratory School, he implemented the school’s Industrial Arts programs.

“I always have said they gave it the wrong name when they put ‘art’ in there,” he laughed. “When I established two new programs for construction management, people began to really get the wrong idea of what I had done because of the connotation of the word ‘art.'”

Martin continued his education at Georgia Southern, becoming a member of the first master’s graduating class in 1960. He was asked to split his time between teaching at Marvin Pittman and Georgia Southern, eventually moving full time to the college’s technology division. With a family of his own by then, he began taking doctoral-level classes in the summer at the University of Missouri and completed his Ed.D.
Before long, John Martin’s Wood Products Manufacturing classes were building for facilities all around campus. In his leisure time, Martin was building “products” of his own. His wife, Kate, is eager to show off the neatly crafted pieces that Martin has made from scratch throughout his life – he has nearly furnished his entire home.

In addition to his church, Martin’s community service includes a long-time membership in Statesboro’s Kiwanis Club. He designed and built the water wheel that stands at Statesboro’s Kiwanis Ogeechee Fairgrounds in his home workshop and assembled it with the help of professors Norman Wells, Don Whaley and retired University administrator Virgil Hicks.

“I was concerned about if I had my balance worked out sufficiently enough that a little bit of water in those troughs would turn it,” he said. The day came to mount the wheel and there was no water flowing. “It was just set in place,” he said. “I caught a glimpse of movement in my peripheral vision and I turned around and I was astonished. That water wheel was turning in just the little bit of breeze that was blowing.”

Georgia Southern was a very different place in the 1950s and `60s, Martin said. He recalls that he took classes in the basement of the Alumni Gym, then taught in the industrial arts building located behind the Marvin Pittman Lab School. Later, when his teaching duties moved to the Carruth Building, “I could walk out and put my foot on the rail of a cow lot where Holstein cows were held, because Georgia Southern had a farm,” he said.

Several faculty families, including the Martins and their young children, lived on campus in houses that lined Georgia Avenue, now bounded by sprawling residence complexes and shops. Their son and daughter, along with the children of other professors, played in the still heavily wooded areas and explored construction sites of the rapidly growing campus.

The Martins lived in a duplex near the location of today’s Russell Union. The other half of the apartment building was home to the college’s maintenance director. “Everybody was congenial,” said Kate. “The atmosphere was like a small-town community.”

Martin vividly recalls the construction of the F.I. Williams Center across the street from his home, the first “official” student center on campus. What was not so good was that meant the demise of the campus’ “Blue Tide” store. Martin was not alone in being sad to see it go in 1959. The Blue Tide was more than just a supply outlet. It was the daily social hub for campus. “That was the only place we had at that time to get a soda, a milkshake, or anything like that – plus our books,” he said.

At one time, before he stopped counting, he calculated that he had witnessed the construction of 36 campus buildings.

For a time, Martin maintained a garden at the urging of President Zach Henderson. There was an open space next to the Health Cottage in the vicinity of today’s Smithsonian National Tick Collection and Henderson asked him, “John why don’t you get out there and make a garden?” “I did,” said Martin, “and when I would go from my classes over to where we lived I would have a shirt and tie and a hound’s tooth hat on or something like that and everybody kidded me about being a gentleman farmer. But I was out there pushing my plow, plowing my garden.”

Their current home was constructed in 1962, and the family moved from their campus duplex. From then until his retirement 23 years ago, he continued to help build what is today’s School of Technology, adding courses and teaching construction techniques.

Retirement hasn’t stopped his involvement in church or Kiwanis. He’s still building. Martin constructed items needed for sports facilities in the years he served as an athletics booster, from rubdown benches to lockers.

“I was very much a football enthusiast, so when I retired I became a Georgia Southern booster,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose construction or let that part of me go, so I agreed to a gift-in-kind situation with the club.

“The University is such an integral part of Statesboro,” he said. “The fact that it has grown to 19,000 students is amazing. These students are really giving back to the community. I’m so proud of the fact that Georgia Southern is here. When we came here, it was just an agricultural town of 5,000 people.”

The 86-year-old veteran has seen Statesboro grow, but knows that some things – like its small-town feel – are just the same.

— Denver Pittman