George Martin, P-38 pilot (#1)
Of the countless times I swam in the chilled, salty Hood CanaI, one will float around my mind forever.
I was 15. Jeff, my best friend, had come with me far out from the shore. It was a rising tide, which meant that we'd encounter these amazing little pockets of rock-warmed water as we swam. We'd hang in them as long as our arms and legs would support us, and then we’d scramble to somewhere shallow.
We were probably extra daring that day because this was George Martin’s place. Jeff’s grandfather. All-around cool character.
World War II P-38 Lightning pilot.
George had the persona you’d imagine: soft-spoken, wise, hardened by experience but warm. He was proud of his property here on the Canal, and he strolled around it as if moved by the tide: never in a hurry but always with a direction.
The ocean was a kind of drug on that day. It was a hard day for me, for reasons that aren’t super relevant. The Canal let me immerse myself in something different and much larger than myself. It felt good.
Today, 25 years later, George Martin has done the same thing.
Beautiful with an asterisk
I'm looking at a wartime photo of George Martin. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen, but it’s the quintessential “guy with a plane” shot. His grin is perfect and honest, and his plane is also being rather honest because, although it's clearly beautiful (I’ll always argue that the P-38 was a looker, in its art deco Lockheed sort of way) it could never hide the enormous gun barrels jutting out of the nose that are meant to rip machines and people apart.
Beautiful with an asterisk. I suppose that describes most of us.
The positioning of the camera also tells me several interesting things:
This is probably the -J variant of the P-38 because of the shape of the engine nacelles, and George's propeller spinners were left in natural metal and not painted in a trim color, like they often were.
His wife’s name, Helen, is painted in wavy red script along the port side of the nose, and there’s a red, swooping triangular design wrapped around the nose, which appears to have been painted by hand instead of masked off. The decals we put on model planes are often much neater than the real thing.
Leftover staining near the gun ports suggests that George has fired his guns in combat.
These details are little smiles to a researcher. They make you want to keep going, see more, wonder more. Sometimes you get some momentum, like when a new photo arrives, and sometimes you’re just floating along, wondering about this fascinating picture and time and place and man.
You can lose yourself in research just like you can lose yourself floating in a calm, undulating body of water.