Eddie Martin Was Direct in Flight and Life

Eddie Martin died last week, and I don’t know why that should have surprised me, since he was 88 years old. But it did. On the half-dozen occasions we met and talked, he seemed a lot more indestructible than the planes he used to fly.

I always pictured him giving short shrift to death if it got too pushy. Eddie Martin didn’t tolerate fools easily, so I figure death must have somehow got the altitude advantage and come at him out of the sun. That’s the only way Eddie Martin could have been shot down.

Martin, of course, is the guy for whom they should have named Orange County Airport. John Wayne had about as much to do with flying as Eddie Martin did with acting. That irritated Eddie, but he accepted it in an irascible sort of way. I pointed out that injustice in this space after Eddie was thrown a bone last year when the airport’s general aviation building was named for him, and he wrote a letter to thank me, saying: “That is an article that I’m very proud of--so much, in fact, I am having it framed.”

The last time I saw Eddie (who insisted on being called by his first name by strangers and friends alike) was at the bash commemorating this event, and his greeting caught the essence of this wonderfully plain-spoken man. After the politicians had made their speeches and Eddie had formally unveiled the plaque dedicated to him, we retired to a tent for libation. Eddie was holding forth at one of the tables, and I went over to shake hands and visit with him.

“Congratulations,” I said to him as we grasped hands.

He thought that over for a full five seconds, then said matter-of-factly: “I don’t know what the hell for.”

That’s the way Eddie thought and talked. He was one of the few mortals I’ve ever known who seemed incapable of dissembling. And I make no claim to knowing him well. But the force of his directness came through loud and clear in a single meeting.

Maybe there were signs that it was time for Eddie to go. After flying--which he gave up more than two decades ago--the two things he loved most in this world were his dog, Jackson, and his memories of a simpler and less cluttered Orange County.

Jackson died last year--a scrawny silky terrier on whom Eddie bestowed his middle name and whom he called “my best friend”--and, at least to Eddie, Orange County died long before that. “I used to be in love with Orange County and Santa Ana,” he told me, “but now they’ve been destroyed. There are just too many people here. And as the people have poured in, the history of this area has been lost.”

Eddie grew a mustache the last few years of his life, which seemed to be a kind of subliminal life-affirming statement. He lived alone in a cottage in an old residential area of Santa Ana amid an impressive clutter that he blamed on Jackson “because it’s his home, not mine.”

Eddie Martin symbolized to me the problems implicit in the American transition from people to machines, from seat-of-the-pants individuality to collective key punching. My World War II flying was a lot closer to Eddie’s time than the computerized complexities of today, and we talked about the contrast with more disdain for the present than nostalgia for the past.

Although Eddie flew for several airlines, it was long before computers took over the cockpit, and he flew only occasionally after World War II, during which he served as a test pilot for Lockheed, working mostly with the P-38 fighter. He hung it up for keeps in 1966 and told me two decades later with some contempt: “I’ve got no interest in those big planes today because you don’t really fly ‘em.”

Eddie was full of stories, but he didn’t live in the past. His main concessions to history were an oversize model of a Nieuport 28 biplane in a back room of his home, a collection of artifacts from his early days of flying which he turned over a few years ago to Orange County’s Martin Aviation--once partly his company, now several times removed--and an autobiography on which he had been working for some years with Judy Liebeck, a local technical writer and historian.

Eddie was an Orange County pioneer who raised neither cattle, produce nor citrus. But he raised the vision of this county to the sky and also raised a little hell in the process. When he started flying in 1923, the average life span of a pilot was seven years, but Eddie beat those odds for almost seven decades. And he wasn’t just lucky. He was good. He had to be because he flew a lot of those years without a parachute and with instruments that told him little more than his air speed and altitude.

I’ve got to believe that dealing with the basics of flying--as he had to do for so many years--made him treat life, itself, with the same kind of directness. He always looked straight at me when he talked--and I could be sure he was saying exactly what he meant.

When the Martin Co. threw a 60th anniversary party, Eddie insisted that they had the founding date wrong, so they threw another party two years later. Huffed Eddie: “I guess I should know. Whose airport was it, anyway?”

At the dedication of his plaque last year, Eddie--as the final speaker--was brief. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing up here following those guys,” he told us. “They said it all.”

Eddie did his most eloquent oratory in the sky, and now he has joined a squadron that includes Charles A. Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes--all of whom he knew. None of them were much as talkers, which will be OK with Eddie.