mill worker. Years later he explained:
My parents wanted to see their children get more education than they had. They were both capable and could have profited by more schooling. They didn’t want to see us have to be bound as they had been. Although no one in my family had been to college, my parents and my high school principal encouraged me.
Martin worked at the cotton mill for a year and won a scholarship to Furman University in nearby Greenville. At the time he enrolled, Furman was only open to white male students. Although Greenville was only about twenty-five miles from the small towns of Seneca and Easley, college life was a strange experience for a student who had always lived in the shadow of a cotton mill, sharing a bedroom with his two younger brothers.
A Furman student once asked the elderly Martin about his university experience:
There were many World War One veterans who had been overseas. In fact, I roomed with one of them. He had been in France and had seen combat duty, as had many others. While there was not an organized movement against war, we often heard “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” The university even closed for three days in September of 1919, allowing the veterans to attend a reunion of the Thirtieth Division, made up of National Guard units from North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
The young man thrived at Furman, relishing classes in philosophy and religion.
One professor was a big influence on me. Dr. Fletcher, an older man from New England, was a colorful person in his own right. He was high-tempered but compassionate, and he didn’t tolerate any foolishness. Yet the students crowded into his class. Dr. Fletcher taught philosophy and psychology, which you had to take first. And some of us who wanted to take his philosophy class worked more seriously in psychology than we did about any other subject that semester.
Even with scholarship aid, Martin had to stop once for a semester, and again for a year, to make enough money to continue his studies. By the time he graduated in 1924, at the age of twenty-three, he had decided to become a Baptist minister.
My freshman year at college, he recalled, the Southern Baptists held conferences for college students all over the South, and since one was on the Furman campus I could afford to attend. Some of the speakers were very interesting to me, especially Dr. Gordon Poteat. He himself was a Furman graduate and had spent a number of years in China. He told us things about China we had never heard.
But the recent college graduate did not have funds for the three years of graduate school necessary to earn a divinity degree. Martin learned that a high school in the mountains of western North Carolina needed teachers. Although the salary was small, he thought that he could pay back some of his college loans and save for seminary if he lived at the boarding school and did not have to pay for an apartment or groceries. Before the days of regional high schools, the church-run school was for students who had no other way to get an education beyond eighth grade. Martin had a happy two years there, teaching mathematics, history, religion, and even coaching the Yancey Collegiate Institute baseball team.
During school holidays he hiked in the mountains.
You have heard of “purple mountains.” Well, I caught them that way again the other afternoon just at sunset. Only once or twice a year you really can see them like that, just the right combination of colors in the leaves, clouds, and sunsets. But it lives with you a long, long time afterward.
Martin also found that he loved teaching, and he appreciated his mountain students and their fierce desire to learn. But he was twenty-five years old and needed to get to graduate school if he was ever to become a minister. In 1926 the Southern economy was so bad that he hadn’t saved much money at all. He might as well go on to seminary and borrow the money he needed. Martin’s replacement, glad to have any kind of job, went to work at the Burnsville, North Carolina, school for only room and board.
As much as he felt at home in the mountains, Martin headed for a city, Louisville, Kentucky, and its Southern Baptist seminary.
I found it exciting. It was stimulating. The one thing was the wide variety of students from all over the South, but also from other parts of the country and even foreign countries. I had not been exposed, in my Furman days, to quite such a mixture. At Furman we had only one Chinese student. There had been a few students from other parts of the United States, but not like in Louisville. Yes, the foreign students were all interesting to me.
At that time, all the students studying for the ministry were men. Women who wanted to have a career in Protestant churches were confined to classes in music and religious education. For the men, the course of study was a difficult three-year graduate program that included Hebrew and Greek languages, church history, and preaching.
The professor who made the biggest impression on me taught missions. He was always stimulating. He met with the student groups and talked about the practical problems that ministers who go overseas to work might face. The man who taught us Greek didn’t stand for any nonsense. But most of the students were so terribly afraid of him that they just sat quietly, struggling with the language. There was one teacher, an old war horse. He fought the Civil War all over again.
Martin had to study hard; he was one of those struggling with Greek. And work on campus to pay for his tuition cut into precious study time.
Besides my jobs at the seminary, one summer I worked for the church association up in the mountains of Kentucky. We taught classes and took a census of each community. I also worked with boys from inner-city Louisville. I was assigned to a boys’ group, teenage and younger. One Saturday I took them to a park which was not too far from the seminary. It was a revelation to find that these youngsters living close to that park had never been to a place with trees and grass and a stream. They just went wild. They thought it was something out of their world.
Many years later, a younger friend who had also studied at the Louisville graduate school asked Martin if he had stayed in awe of those intimidating teachers.
No, by the second year we were more relaxed. The newness had worn off and our fear of those lofty professors had diminished, so we could be ourselves a little more.
Martin stayed at the seminary for two of the three years needed to get his degree and once again ran out of money. By this time the beginnings of the great Depression made it impossible for students to find part-time jobs, since too many people were competing for too few positions.
But schools always needed teachers, and now Martin was an experienced one. He accepted an offer to teach not far from Burnsville, where he had begun his career. Like the Yancey Collegiate Institute, Mars Hill College, in a village near Asheville, North Carolina, had been founded as a high school for mountain students. While there were still a few twelfth graders, most were in their first and second year of college. Martin was hired to teach mathematics, Bible, and church history.
I also taught a world history course when they had nobody to fill in.
Unlike his replacement at Yancey, Martin was paid a small salary. However, in 1929, tuition was so low at Mars Hill College that teachers were paid little besides their room and board. Tuition for a semester was $27.50. “Table Board” (food) was $50.00 per semester for all who worked in the dining hall at least forty minutes each day; all others had to pay $65.00 for each eighteen-week term. A furnished room with “steam heat, electric lights, and water” was $50.00, with each of the two roommates paying half. Lab fees ranged from $4.00 to $8.00 per term. A diploma for the associates of arts degree cost each graduate $3.00. While these prices seem laughingly low today, college was still beyond the reach of most farm families who had almost no cash and who traded farm crops for coffee, salt, and shoes.
Coming in from an
