Joe Martin's journey: The making of a novelist

Scholar, bank exec, guy in a wheelchair - it all contributed to who he is

By ED WILLIAMS

How does one prepare to be a novelist?

That question was on my mind last week as I prepared to introduce my old friend Joe Martin at Myers Park Baptist Church before a discussion of his new novel, "Fire in the Rock," a coming-of-age novel inspired by his own youth in South Carolina.

Joe and Joan Martin would be there, along with son David, who would read excerpts from the book. Our minister, Steve Shoemaker, would then lead a discussion.

So how Joe Martin get to be a novelist? Here is his orderly path.

He was a cheerleader at Davidson College. He earned a master's degree in American studies at the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in medieval English at Duke University.

Which prepared him, of course, to work for a bank.

In 1973 he joined a modest regional bank known as NCNB and became one of the platoon of visionaries who eventually made it Bank of America, the nation's largest.

In 1978, he walked away from a successful career to become a college administrator. He went to raise money and head the college relations department at Queens College. He returned to the bank in 1983 when Hugh McColl Jr. was named CEO.

While Joe worked for the bank, no one mistook him for a banker. You'd have had more luck getting a loan from your brother-in-law than from Joe.

Instead, he was one of the bank's premier idea men. Some also saw him as the bank's conscience, a sort of Jiminy Cricket in pinstripes whom the money managers counted on for ideas about how to use the bank to build a better community.

Joe also was an active supporter of public education. The Martin children went to public schools here.

In the late 1980s his concern about schools led him to seek and win a seat on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board.

It's hard to imagine an unlikelier elected official than Joe - not because he lacked knowledge or commitment, but because he has notoriously small tolerance for idiots, a substantial number of whom focused their attention on (or even served on) the school board.

In October of 1994 Joe entered a new phase of his life. He was diagnosed with amyotropic lateral sclerosis - Lou Gehrig's disease.

ALS has sapped his physical powers but hasn't weakened his mind. He can move his eyes and raise his eyebrows. It's amazing how much communication those small movements allow.

He writes now with the aid of an Eyegaze computer system, which enables him to type by focusing his eyes on a letter of the alphabet.

His doctorate in medieval English amply prepared him to understand the workings of the machine. He told my colleague David Perlmutt in an e-mail exchange earlier this year, "My mother was able to make the whole world do whatever she wanted with a look. As far as I know, this is the same system."

In recent years he has become a spokesman for social justice and racial unity, and has rightly received the community's gratitude for those efforts.

He's also a 60-year-old guy in a wheelchair. Here's what he told reporter Perlmutt about his condition: "I want you to understand, the paralyzed man you see is not who I am. `Paralyzed' is something I have now been given to do, but it is not who I am.

"I am who I was. And the discovery of that enabled me to get on with my life, despite the diagnosis of inevitable total paralysis."

He added, "I don't think I am courageous; I suppose people may think I am dying, and that may even be fair - I thought so for a while, too. But I think I am still living, and the evidence suggests that I am! And so I am just doing what I think living people should do."

So he is. Encased in a body that has pretty much retired from action, the essential Joe Martin carries on, with humor and resoluteness. He does so with a conviction that what he's doing isn't courageous, it's just getting on with a life that now must be lived under unusual circumstances.

How do you prepare to be a novelist? In Joe's case, you develop the ability to observe the human condition clearly and sympathetically, to separate what's important from what isn't, and to comment on it in an insightful, meaningful way.

Joe Martin is traveling that path. The wisdom he has gained along the way is on display in his work, and in his life.

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