Kites to Bombers

(See Cover)

He was a husky, solemn, shock-headed kid of 6 when he first decided there was money to be made in the quantity production of flying machines. That was 47 years ago in wind-whipped Liberal, Kans., where his father, Clarence Martin, had set up one of the first hardware stores in the Sunflower State's southwest. Working from the time school was out until bedtime, Martin's son, Glenn Luther, methodically turned out biplane box kites at the rate of three a day, sold them for 25-c- apiece.

Last week the Kansas kite builder got an order for some more of his quantity-produced flying machines. The U. S. Army bought a half-million dollars' worth* of Martin 167 attack bombers, two-engine ships that can streak through the air at 360 m.p.h., tote a ton of bombs, maneuver against the nimblest pursuit ship in the air. It was no two-bit order, but it was not big enough to give pleasure to Glenn Luther Martin. He had hoped to fill the $15,000,000 bomber order which the War Department simultaneously placed with his big competitor, Douglas Aircraft Co. of Santa Monica, Calif. But the fact that he did not get the big order was not even a serious setback to Glenn Martin today. His $10,000.000 plant outside Baltimore had just delivered 117 B10 bombers to The Netherlands, was working on a ten-million dollar order for new gull-winged flying boats for the Navy, 215 of the 167 bombers for France. Altogether his backlog of orders came to $39,500,000 worth of planes. With the new contract, however, the biggest plane manufacturing backlog, $48,000,000, glows in Rival Douglas' fireplace.

Mother's Boy. A stoutish, purse-mouthed man who looks out of shining spectacles with an amiably deliberate expression, Glenn Martin is exhibit A1 of what a human being can do by channeling all his time and talent in one direction. From his earliest kite-making days, he has been a no-nonsense man. When he was a youngster he promised his mother he would not drink until he was 21; at 53, he still keeps his promise. He was too poor and busy in his youth to smoke, nor does he yet. He never had much time for women, has never married.

Minta Martin had a dream before Glenn's birth that she was up in a flying machine, a circumstance which probably gives Glenn Martin title to the earliest aeronautical propensity in the airplane business. She gave him a sheet to sail his wagon before the Kansas wind. She saw him begin to tinker with machinery and at night read him newspaper articles about the flight experiments of Chanute and Lilienthal. She was just as pleased when he made himself an expert mechanic by working in a garage as she was when he studied business at Kansas Wesleyan.

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."

But 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.

One summer he barnstormed through the West carrying a woman parachute jumper in pink tights, to be let out over county fairs. He even set a few 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.

One of his early passengers was Minta Martin, whom he took ,up precariously perched on the leading edge of the lower wing. Another was Cinemactress Mary Pickford, for whom he played the villain in The Girl of Yesterday, renting himself and his plane for $700 a day. Still another was Musicomedienne Valeska Suratt, who planted three kisses on his cheek after he landed her in front of a crowd in Los Angeles. Blushing Martin ran away, later told newsmen soberly "her air conduct was good."

By 1917, Glenn L. Martin Co. was in Cleveland and its president had virtually quit flying. From that plant came the first Martin bomber, a huge, two-engined biplane. Built too late to get into the War, the first Martin bomber went to the Air Service. A great cranelike thing that drifted in stodgily to its landings, it was the standard bombardment plane of the service until the middle '20s.

To Baltimore. Adding designers, draftsmen, withdrawing more & more from designing to administer the business, Martin turned out better & better models in rapid succession. He swapped little information with other manufacturers, became known as a sombre lone wolf. From the Cleveland plant came the first plane built specifically for mail service, the first metal American monoplane, of which the Navy bought 36, the first bomber with an alloy-steel fuselage, of which the Navy bought 103.

By 1925 it was time to expand again, and this time Builder Martin decided to have plenty of room. From unsuspecting holders of tidewater property above Baltimore, options were cautiously obtained by agents who represented themselves as acting for a New York sportsmen's club. When they were all in, Glenn L. Martin Co. had options on 1,243 acres of land, was ready to build a plant.

Since then things have gone a-humming. Soon after he moved into the plant Martin told friends he had a ship coming off the drawing boards that would revolutionize military aviation. It did. The ship was the Martin B10, a two-motored monoplane. With a range of 1,800 miles and a bomb load of 2,400 pounds, it could pull away from any pursuit ship then in the air at a top speed of 250 miles an hour. The U. S. Army took 151 of them, the Argentine 35, The Netherlands 117. The last of the Netherlands order is being set up for flight this week in Java. Altogether 340 B-10s rolled out through the factory doors, to be flown to nearby purchasers, or to be packed in crates for overseas shipment. They were so far ahead of bombers of the day that they won Builder Martin the Collier Trophy in 1933.

Sandwiched between military and naval orders the Martin plant also turned out the first clippers for Pan American's Pacific run, huge, four-engined flying boats. Meanwhile, with pursuit ships getting faster & faster, practical, businesslike Glenn Martin laid down another job for his designers. What was now needed, he said, was a bomber that could defend itself against fighters. Since it could no longer outspeed them, its only chance to stay in the air lay in giving it enough maneuverability and fire power to hold its own in aerial combat.

The answer was the new 167, a sleek, mid-wing job. Most expensive of Martin's war babies, the first one cost $882,000 before its tests were completed. Last January, while Douglas was under scrutiny in the Senate for showing its new attack bomber to France before the U. S. had a crack at it--by and with the consent of President Roosevelt--Martin calmly went ahead with his order of 1675 for France.

Also he entered a 167, fitted with U. S. instruments and equipped for Air Corps tactical missions, in the Army's attack-bomber competition. Douglas, which has also been one of the big Army contractors, had lost its entry when it started the Senate asking questions: at Santa Monica Test Pilot Johnny Cable cracked up the new Douglas ship, with a French observer aboard, and was killed. Re-entering the competition late, Douglas turned up with a slicked-up job, reputedly with a speed above 400 miles an hour, and, in a Garrison finish, last week took first money.

In the midst of 1939's war-scared aircraft manufacturing boom, Glenn Martin remains, as usual, priestlike and detached. To his office he goes every morning, hurling along in a 16-cylinder, seven-passenger Cadillac ("they cruise better when they're big") at speeds that make motorcycle policemen wince. But they make no arrests for Martin is the second largest employer of labor in the Baltimore industrial area. (The largest: Bethlehem Steel.)

He sits down at his desk before 8:30, tall and impassive, and with slim spatulate fingers runs through his mail. During the morning he drops in at the engineering building, where 460 engineers and draftsmen are at work, to peer at blueprints and drawings. Sometimes he goes through the plant, where 6,000 mechanics turn out his ships in a method as nearly resembling straight-line production as fee aircraft industry has yet approximated. But Glenn Martin does not tinker with airplanes any more. He tells other people what he wants. When he returns to his office he is as unruffled and immaculate as before. A fussy dresser, he goes in for double-breasted suits in sturdy fabrics, insists that his tailors (Bell & Co., Manhattan) put cuffs on his coat sleeves, adorn his lapels and cuffs with little raised ridges that give the suits a ribbed appearance vaguely like the belly of a B10.

Frequently he goes to Manhattan, tearing up the highway at breakneck speed with his mother sitting unruffled beside him. But never does he go by airplane. Few years ago only stockholders in the company were Martin and Motorman Louis Chevrolet. But in 1934, with funds needed for expansion, 325,000 shares of Glenn L. Martin Co. were put on the market at $11.50 a share (current price: $34.625). Today, Martin remains well in control with some 37% of the stock in his hands, but the bankers who are now interested in his company have taken him out of the air. Because Martin is the Martin Company they are taking no chances. His life is insured for $1,000,000 and the policy is void if he so much as gets into an airplane on which a propeller is turning.

In 1937, the Martin Company turned a net profit of $1,144,858. Last year it made $2,349,355 (equal to $2.15 a share) and in the first quarter of this year it made $682,496. Yet Martin has never paid a cash dividend, has ploughed back its earnings into plant expansion and reserve.

When Martin goes to Manhattan with his mother, he stays over to see a show or two, any kind just so he's sure it's likely to be good. Occasionally he goes duck shooting on the Chesapeake. Still more rarely he goes on short cruises in his 107-foot, twin-Diesel yacht Glenmar, from which he keeps in communication with the plant by radiotelephone. He likes to talk about plans for a long trip at sea, but probably he will never make it, because he invariably finds ways to keep himself busy.

With the help of a maid, widowed Minta Martin keeps house for her son in Baltimore's swank Ambassador Apartments, just a short walk from the Second Presbyterian Church, of which she is an active member. Martin sometimes goes with her to church on Sundays, dodges it when he can. On evenings when they don't go to the movies he likes to sit at home, surrounded by massive furniture and by paintings of landscapes which Minta Martin has dashed off from time to time over the past 40 years. Two years ago Mrs. Martin stopped painting, doesn't expect to resume again. There is no more room on the walls.

Sitting at home, Glenn Martin goes over airplane plans, thinks about plant expansions, reads technical papers on aircraft design in which he tries to keep up in his spare time. He seldom goes out, dislikes social functions, steers clear of parties and tries to keep at work. When he feels overworked, which sometimes happens after a hard day, he takes a turn around the block and goes to bed.

* Probably for three ships. Service regulations forbid announcement of the number of planes in any U. S. order.

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