Up from Indiana

It was a long, hard climb but ambitious Mary Martin made it.

Obsessed with an itch for riches, Mary Martin (then Mary Violette) left her native Goshen, Indiana when she was about 30, sold diamonds for a while, then heard about something better--northern Ontario's gold fields. In 1906 she got a job in a Haileybury, Ont. law office and for a month made out 60 to 65 prospec tors' affidavits daily at $2.50 each.

Then: "When I asked for a raise that wasn't granted, I painted my own shingle and opened my own office [at Swastika, Ont.]. My desk was a store box." She made $50,000 and learned to cuss and drink as well as any sourdough.

At Kirkland Lake she met and married Prospector Ernest Martin, later a partner of Sir Harry Oakes who was murdered in the Bahamas last year. Together the Martins wielded pick & shovel in bitter cold weather to make their properties produce. The properties obliged nobly. At one time th? Martins owned 90,000 shares of Lake Shore mining company stock--$50 a share. Mary Martin, 69, and weather-beaten, died in Oakville, Ont. last December. Last week her will, filed for probate, disclosed that she left $71,700 in real estate, $17,686 in mortgages, $28,138 in jewels, $320,773 in stocks, $568,768 in cash. Dominion and provincial taxes will nip off between $300,000 and $400,000. The rest goes to charities (about $80,000), to friends & relatives (about $600,000).

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