Bureaucrat's Paradise

When Robert Martin, South Dakota's director of economic development for the past nine years, died of a heart attack last month at 52, few of his co-workers could recall much about him. A quiet, polite man with thinning hair who invariably wore conservative slacks and sports jackets, Martin seldom socialized with his staff and never brought his wife to state functions, apparently preferring to spend all his time with his family. But within a few days of his death at his home in Pierre, the state capital, Martin's fellow employees found out to their astonishment from two lawyers inquiring about the estate that Martin was anything but a sedentary homebody: he was, it seems, a bold, longtime bigamist.

Like some Main Street version of Alec Guinness in a Midwest remake of The Captain's Paradise, the taciturn bureaucrat for years had secretly been supporting two separate families in two South Dakota towns some 200 miles apart: Pierre (pop. 10,300), where he maintained both a branch office and a modest house in a neat, middle-class neighborhood, and Sioux Falls (pop. 79,800), where he had his main office and a flat in an apartment complex known as the Tally-Ho.

The revelations about Martin's double life came as a total surprise to his two wives, who typically saw him for a few days a week before he would leave town on what he presumably described as "state business." Martin's Pierre-based first wife, Mary Lou, in her late 40s, who bore him four children, now aged eight to 25, moved with her husband from Kansas in 1967. She refused to comment on her husband's connubial commuting except to maintain stiffly: "This is not fact." Wife No. 2, Patricia, 34, with whom Martin had five children, now 14 months to nine years old, was less reticent. She told reporters that she felt "sorry" for Martin's other wife but she thought he had been divorced.

By happenstance, on the day after Martin's death the Sioux Falls daily newspaper published a half-page feature story on Patricia's mastectomy, in which she praised her husband for his "marvelous" behavior. Now she felt differently. "I'm just not some sweetie stashed in the corner," she told reporters last week. "I would like to get hold of that man myself and ask him a few questions, but, of course, that's impossible."

No Dignity. The state also had a few questions. South Dakota Attorney General William Janklow wants to know whether Martin falsified his expense vouchers to maintain his two wives, nine children and two homes; his annual salary was only $23,500. Janklow is ready to ask a grand jury to investigate Martin's accounts, which, among other things, generally list the Tally-Ho as lodging at $11.50 a night.

Martin's deception is turning into a nightmare for one of his families. His Sioux Falls wife Patricia, who says she married Martin in 1968 although she has not been able to find the license, claims that she and her children have nothing to live on while the courts try to untangle Martin's estate. Says she bleakly: "My humility is gone. My pride is gone. I don't have a shred of dignity left. I've been reduced to having to beg for aid for dependent children and food stamps. I can go through anything, but those children have to eat."

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