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The Richest Man in Town

By V.J. Smith

Coffee, Tears, and Fried Corn Meal Mush

"You don't know what you've gotten yourself into," Marty said as I greeted him in the restaurant of a local grocery store. That's the place he picked for our first meeting.

Marty had been sitting in a booth drinking coffee when I arrived. I brought a notebook and pencil with me. This man had a story to tell and I felt a need to record it.

I had already been referring to Marty's customer-service qualities in my speeches, but other than the few moments I had seen him at Wal-Mart, I didn't know anything about him. Why was he so different than any other cashier I had ever met? I had no intention of writing a talk about his life, much less a book. I just wanted to know why he was so happy--and what I could learn from him.

After buying a cup of coffee I sat down with him. Idle conversation filled those next few minutes until I asked, "Are you married?"

Marty's eyes lit up. "I got married to the most beautiful girl in the world--and she still is. Her name is Mickey and you need to meet her." I told him I would like to do that.

"Kids?" I asked.

"Four," he said, "three boys and a girl."

I opened my notebook and asked Marty if it was okay to write down his answers to my questions. Marty looked at the notebook and grinned. "You want to write stuff about me?"

It was obvious he hadn't been interviewed before. I thought I'd start with some easy questions.

"When were you born?"

"August 12, 1926. I'll be seventy-four years old this August. It's hard to believe."

"So you had to through the Great Depression. What was that like?" I asked.

He paused for a moment, looked at his hands circling the coffee cup, and let his mind take a trip back in time. "We just lived life from day to day. My family was very hard-up at that time and I had just figured everyone else was in the same boat. Most of them were."

Marty's mother stayed at home to take care of him and his brother and two sisters. His father was a common laborer, moving from one job to the next, often taking the family from town to town. In one place he worked on a turkey farm, in another he tended bar. Maybe it was the times, mixed with his lack of any particular skill.

"Growing up in the thirties and forties, people cared about people," Marty said. "We helped each other out without giving it a second thought. I suppose that's carried over to today."

As a young boy Marty watched his father pour drinks at a bar. "I remember a lot of men who worked hard in the stone quarry and when they got their paychecks they would go to the beer parlor. The would squander their money while their family was at home with very little to eat. I guess that is one of the reasons why I never drank."

After taking a sip of coffee, Marty continued. "We were dirt poor. Most days I ate a piece of bread smeared with lard and sprinkled with some salt and pepper on it. I don't ever remember eating red meat during the entire thirties. I never got to go to a restaurant until I was ten years old."

He started to laugh. "Have you had fried corn meal mush?" I told him I had never heard of it. "I'll fix it for you sometime. I still eat it because I kind of like it," he said, still laughing. I was smiling, too, as he remembered those years.

"I'll tell you how bad it got," Marty told me. "When I was eight years old I had a pet chicken. She would follow me around like it was a dog. Usually  you can't pick up a chicken and hold it, but that one you could. Things got so bad we were forced to eat the poor thing. I cried, but I had to eat. That's the way it was."

My smile quickly faded. Now I felt bad for smiling. These could be sad memories for Marty. Yet he continued to share them with me.

"When I was a kid I went to the dump ground and found the inner tube of an old tire. I made myself a slingshot. I got good with that slingshot and, once in a while, I got a rabbit."

Marty was silent for a time, then tears ran from his eyes. In a quiet voice he said, "You know one of the greatest memories I have of my mother was the day I walked through the front door holding two rabbits. My mother sat at the kitchen table and cried. She couldn't believe we had two rabbits to eat." His voice trailed off. We said nothing for a few minutes, just drank coffee and wiped away tears.

Finally, Marty said, "My problem is that I'm a softy. I got that from my mother. Can we talk about something else?"

At that point I scrambled for something to ask. The first six questions I had written on my list dealt with family maters. It was obvious I needed to change directions.

"Why do you shake hands with the customers?" I asked.

The question revived him. "It happened by accident," Marty replied. "A couple of years ago, when I was first hired as a greeter at the store, for college students walked in. I shook their hands. One guy walked a few steps, turned around and said, 'I like that!' So I've been doing it ever since."

"I shake hands with two hundred and twenty people a day. Some people want a hug. There was one lady who wanted a kiss." He laughed. "Most people seem to like it. I know some don't. Germs, you know. There was one guy who wouldn't shake my hand because, he said, 'I'm a Quaker, not a shaker.' I'm still trying to figure that one out."

He had given a lot of thought to the technique behind that handshake. "You have to look people dead in the eye when you shake their hand. That's the only way to go. I'm trying to show them that I appreciate them," he said.

The shaking of hands surprised the newcomers to the store. Most of the locals expected it, and liked it, but for the uninitiated, it was a whole new experience.

"Oh, let me tell you a story," Marty said. "A year ago a woman came through my line and I stuck out my hand. She jumped back. She acted like I had a gun or something. I said to her, 'Hasn't anyone ever shook your hand before?' The lady said, 'I'm from South Carolina. There's store in South Carolina where they shake hands all the time.'

"I yelled, 'Hooray for South Carolina!' and she walked out the door. Five minutes later she was back in my line, buying nothing. I said, 'Can I help you?' She touched my arm and said, 'I lied to you. I got out in the parking lot and started thinking about it. There's no store in South Carolina where they shake hands. You're the first one. I needed to come back in here and apologize for lying. Will you accept my apology?"

Marty whacked his hand on the table and laughed. "Do you believe that?" he asked.

I grinned and thought to myself, "Marty got that woman to find religion in the parking lot of Wal-Mart."

At that point a restaurant worker came by with a mop and a pail filled with water. It was a signal our conversation needed to come to an end. I told Marty I would like to talk to him again. "That would be great," replied. "Why don't you come to my house next Tuesday night? You can meet Mickey."

"Where do you live?"

"Number Fifty-seven, Normandy Village," he said. I had to think for a moment before I remembered that Normandy Village was a trailer park. I had driven by there many times.

"Oh," I said, "you live in a trailer?"

Marty looked at me and with a quiet sense of pride said, "I own a double-wide."

We shook hands and said goodbye. I left the store with more questions that I had when I walked in. The main one was simple: Why was he so happy?

I had known a lot of people who owned big cars, earned big paychecks, lived in big houses and had seemingly perfect family lives. Yet they were miserable. This guy was still working into his seventies, came through some tough times and didn't seem to have a lot of material things. He was the happy one.

I was hoping to find my answers in a trailer park.

"You have to look people dead in the eye when you shake their hand."

Nights at the Round Table

Narrow roads wound through the Normandy Village trailer park. Following Marty's directions, I made two quick lefts and suddenly found myself staring at a double-wide home. "That must be it," I thought.

Marty greeted me at the door with a brisk handshake. "Welcome,. This is Mickey," he said. Mickey had kind eyes and a warm smile. She appeared to a little shy, even when I extended my hand. After a few moments, Marty said, "Let's go into the kitchen and sit at the table."

That round wood table became our visiting place on countless nights. I would sit directly across from Marty. Mickey would be only an arm's length from her husband.

The coffee pot was always on. Several times during the course of an evening Marty or Mickey would ask, "Can I get you another cup of coffee?" Then, they would politely argue about who would get the cup. "I'll get it, honey, just sit down," or, "No, babe, I've got it." This happened time after time.

I don't like to drink coffee at night. Not wanting to offend them, I drank it anyway--and drank some more. Sometimes eight cups of coffee at a sitting. I found out later that Marty purposely kept my cup full, thinking I would leave if it were empty. It was his way of saying, "Please stay."

I brought along my notebook for my early visits to the Martinson home. On that first night, I opened it and Marty looked at Mickey. He nodded towards the notebook and said, "See, he writes stuff down."

Marty left school in the ninth grade to earn money for the family. For the next three years he worked in a traveling carnival. The job required him to operate all the rides and run penny-pitch games and the dart booth. Marty said, "The people I worked with weren't regular carnies, they were clean people."

Life with the carnival ended with a draft letter from Uncle Sam in August 1944. Marty was eighteen years old when the United States was fighting wars on two fronts. As a private in the United States Army, he said to the Philippines to fight the Japanese.

"I got shot at," Marty said, "and I shot back." He sent most of his pay home so his parents could buy a house.

Marty was part of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation." I thought he might like to tell me about some of his experiences. I asked him, "Do you have special memories of the war?"

The question turned him silent. Tears filled his eyes, and in a soft voice he said, "I saw so many of my friends blown up in front of my face. I can't talk about it." So we didn't.

He could talk about the end of the war. He was a troop transport ship anchored a few miles off the Japanese coast awaiting orders. "Our commander told us that a lot of us were going to die when we invaded Japan. I was scared to death," he said. Then atomic bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the surrender. Marty said, "When I heard about the bombs, I was happy. Now, I feel sad about those poor Japanese people who died. But I got to go home."

Other wartime memories were just too painful. His grandson asked him to come to school to talk about World War II. On the night he told me about his grandson's invitation he said, "I ... I ... I... can't!" Then he threw back his head and let about a high-pitched cry.

Mickey jumped from her chair and put an arm around Marty. "It's okay, honey, it's okay," she told him. "You don't have to talk about it."

Mickey had grown up under difficult circumstances, too. When she was nine years old, her parents were forced to give up their children because they couldn't care for them. Nine brothers and sisters were shipped off to orphanages.

Marty's quite way attracted her when they first met. It also nearly kept them apart.

Mickey found the other men she had dated a little too brassy for her. She met Marty through her sister. "He was quiet, shy, and handsome," she told me. But Marty was too shy to ask her out, and she insisted that he personally ask her for a date. He had approached her sister to see if Mickey might be interested in him.

He did ask her out. Still uncertain whether she wanted to date him, Mickey asked her sister what she thought of Marty. "He would be a good catch," she said, "Besides, he's good to his mother."

That was enough. They courted for two years before they were married by a justice of the peace in a furniture store on June 1, 1950. "That was when you could get married for two dollars. The license cost us tow bucks," Marty said.

"And we had to borrow that!" chimed in Mickey. They both laughed at the memory.

"We've had a beautiful marriage," Marty said. "Our friends call us M&M kids. Get it? M for Marty and M for Mickey."

The early years were difficult ones for the M&M kids, as they were for most young couples they knew. "We brushed our teeth with Life-boy Soap," Marty said.

His wife worked as a store clerk for thirty-five cents an hour. "We paid a babysitter twenty-five cents an hour," Mickey said, "so I was working for eighty cents a day."

Their only guilty pleasure was smoking. That, too, was subject to their tight budget.

"We smoked Wings cigarettes," Marty told me. "You could get 'em for fifteen cents a pack. They were really long so we cut them in half. Instead of having twenty cigarettes, we had forty."

Marty worked in newspaper shops in a few small towns over the course of forty-two years before he retired. "It's my only regret. I should have quit sooner," he said. "I love mixing with people and I to do that now."

He worked in a restaurant for a while, then for seventeen months took care of a man who suffered from Parkinson's disease. He worked for another restaurant after that.

Then a friend heard that Wal-Mart was looking for greeters at the local store, and he encouraged Marty to apply. The woman who hired Marty told me that when she offered him the job he broke down and cried.

I asked Marty about that moment. He said, "Yeah, I remember it. After she told me I was hired she walked out into the hallway and I heard her say to someone, 'Boy, I've got a honey in here.'"