Walter Martin’s longtime friend and sociology colleague Ben Johnson stepped to the podium as ambient harp music and muted conversations wound into silence.
“Today we are here to remember the life of Walter Tilford Martin,” Johnson said to the group of family and friends who gathered Sunday in Gerlinger Lounge to celebrate Martin’s life. He died March 13 at age 84.
In 1939, he married Rena Elizabeth Buckley in Seattle. Martin’s family was not particularly interested in higher education, but his wife encouraged him to pursue it.
At the time, Martin was interested in social work, but when he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Washington in March 1945, he found the social work program didn’t begin until fall. He approached a sociology professor, who offered him a job as a research assistant.
“He got hooked,” Johnson said. “That’s how he became a sociologist.”
Martin moved to Oregon and began teaching at the University in 1947 for an annual salary of $3,000. He served as a visiting professor throughout the United States and in Australia and Kenya, and he retired from the University in 1979. He was chairman of the sociology department from 1957 to 1968. His interests were in human ecology, demography and criminology.
“He had a distinguished career,” Johnson said. “But he wasn’t a one-track man.”
Wood sculpting, non-professional writing and gardening also held his interest, and he was a dedicated family man. He wrote genealogies of his side of the family as well as his wife’s. He often made an effort to get his whole family into the outdoors for camping and hiking trips.
David Martin, one of Martin’s four children, spoke of his father’s hardworking character and his storytelling ability.
“When he came to visit us, he expected to be given a saw, a shovel or a paintbrush,” David Martin, who lives in Redondo Beach, Calif., said. “I had a feeling when (my parents) left it was because we ran out of chores.”
He said his father would rewrite fairy tales and fables, using the children as main characters. Martin also invented some stories of his own.
One story that has also reached Martin’s five grandchildren is that of the “Traveling Inner Tube.” The family was on a road trip when the inner tube, which was tethered to the top of the car, escaped.
Instead of leaving the sad image of the tube lying dusty and abandoned on some road, Martin wove an ongoing tale involving this inner tube’s journeys and adventures.
“It picked itself up and struggled to get home,” David Martin said.
Dudley Poston Jr. is a sociology professor at Texas A&M and a former student of Martin’s.
“Walter Martin is the person responsible for where I am today,” Poston said. “Walt saw something in me that none of my other
professors did.”
In a letter presented by Johnson, Martin’s former student Jack Gibbs wrote that he believed Martin would be embarrassed by the compliments.
“I’m confident he would say something like ‘cease the exaggerations and just say goodbye.’”
“That is what I do,” Johnson said, through the crowd’s laughter. “That is what we do.”
He lifted his hand high and waved goodbye to Walter Martin.
The family requests memorial contributions be sent to Mount Pisgah Arboretum, 33735 Seavey Loop Road, Eugene, Ore., 97405.