Transport: Kites to Bombers

(See Cover)

He was a husky, solemn, shock-headed kid of 6 when he first decided there was money to be made in the quantity production of flying machines. That was 47 years ago in wind-whipped Liberal, Kans., where his father, Clarence Martin, had set up one of the first hardware stores in the Sunflower State's southwest. Working from the time school was out until bedtime, Martin's son, Glenn Luther, methodically turned out biplane box kites at the rate of three a day, sold them for 25¢ apiece.

Last week the Kansas kite builder got an order for some more of his quantity-produced flying machines. The U. S. Army bought a half-million dollars' worth* of Martin 167 attack bombers, two-engine ships that can streak through the air at 360 m.p.h., tote a ton of bombs, maneuver against the nimblest pursuit ship in the air. It was no two-bit order, but it was not big enough to give pleasure to Glenn Luther Martin. He had hoped to fill the $15,000,000 bomber order which the War Department simultaneously placed with his big competitor, Douglas Aircraft Co. of Santa Monica, Calif. But the fact that he did not get the big order was not even a serious setback to Glenn Martin today. His $10,000.000 plant outside Baltimore had just delivered 117 B10 bombers to The Netherlands, was working on a ten-million dollar order for new gull-winged flying boats for the Navy, 215 of the 167 bombers for France. Altogether his backlog of orders came to $39,500,000 worth of planes. With the new contract, however, the biggest plane manufacturing backlog, $48,000,000, glows in Rival Douglas' fireplace.

Mother's Boy. A stoutish, purse-mouthed man who looks out of shining spectacles with an amiably deliberate expression, Glenn Martin is exhibit A1 of what a human being can do by channeling all his time and talent in one direction. From his earliest kite-making days, he has been a no-nonsense man. When he was a youngster he promised his mother he would not drink until he was 21; at 53, he still keeps his promise. He was too poor and busy in his youth to smoke, nor does he yet. He never had much time for women, has never married.

Minta Martin had a dream before Glenn's birth that she was up in a flying machine, a circumstance which probably gives Glenn Martin title to the earliest aeronautical propensity in the airplane business. She gave him a sheet to sail his wagon before the Kansas wind. She saw him begin to tinker with machinery and at night read him newspaper articles about the flight experiments of Chanute and Lilienthal. She was just as pleased when he made himself an expert mechanic by working in a garage as she was when he studied business at Kansas Wesleyan.

Glenn's father liked it better when the Martins moved to Santa Ana, Calif, and Glenn began making $3,000 to $4,000 a year selling Fords and Maxwells. When Glenn began making gliders in his garage, Father Martin's eyebrows raised. When Glenn rented an abandoned Methodist church, locked the doors, painted the windows and, with a whittled propeller and a Ford Model N motor, began to construct an airplane, his alarmed father thought Glenn had taken leave of his senses.

Mother Martin did not. She used to carry the coal-oil lamp around at night while Glenn climbed about his contraption, gluing fabric on the wings, varnishing the struts.