The Martin Guitar Company has had a lot of Christian Fredericks in its long history. The first, founder C.F. Martin Sr., was born in 1796, while the most recent, current CEO C.F. IV, recently turned 50. Smack dab in the middle of the almost two-centuries-old Martin saga was C.F. III, a quiet man who, by his own admission, didn’t lead the company into new markets or champion important innovations. Yet it’s clear that he left a legacy that has probably been even more critical to the company’s survival–and to its recent phenomenal growth.
Christian Frederick Martin III was born in 1894 in Nazareth, Pa., the first-born child of Frank Henry Martin and Jennifer Keller. Frank Henry, son of C.F. Martin Jr., was the dynamo of change at the small factory nestled on a tree-lined street just a few blocks from the town square. Under F.H. Martin’s leadership, the company grew from a small, guitars-only workshop employing about a half-dozen German-born craftsmen to one of America’s major fretted-instrument manufacturers. Martin had been stuck in a rut for decades when Frank Henry took over at the age of 23, after his father’s death in 1888. Although widely recognized as builders of the country’s finest guitars, all gut-string in those days, Martin’s annual sales had been stagnant since the Civil War, and rarely surpassed 300 instruments annually. With big factories like Lyon & Healy of Chicago (makers of Washburn guitars, banjos, and mandolins) boasting production of 100,000 instruments per year, it was clear that Martin had to change to survive.
North Street Factory circa 1900
It’s probably not a coincidence that C.F. III was born just a few months before Martin began building mandolins–and around the same time that Frank Henry broke away from a moribund New York distributor with long and close connections to previous generations of the Martin family, both in Germany and America. Along with consolidating and standardizing Martin models, introducing mandolins and issuing the company’s first catalog, Frank Henry began to aggressively push distribution of the company’s instruments into new markets on the west coast of the continent. By the time C.F.III was old enough to sweep floors and wind strings at the small factory adjoining the family home, crates of Martin guitars and mandolins were being shipped to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with some then making the long boat ride to Honolulu.
CF Martin III and his mother, Jenny Keller Martin
C.F. III, called Frederick, and later Fred, by family and friends, had a brother one year his junior, Herbert Keller, with whom he played guitar and mandolin duets at social functions in the greater Lehigh Valley. Even today, C.F. III is the only Martin to have headed the company and performed on its signature product in public. What was far more important in his father’s eyes, however, was for Frederick to become the first Martin to attend college, and both he and his brother graduated from Princeton. While the boys were draining the family coffers in nearby New Jersey, their father embarked on an even more ambitious expansion of the company business and began building ukuleles and steel-string guitars for the new Hawaiian music craze. (Frank Henry had other financial obligations besides his immediate family–he was also responsible for supporting his mother and two unmarried sisters.) Frederick did well in college and had hoped to continue his studies at Harvard; he was even considering a career outside the Martin orbit, but around the time he graduated the family company was beginning its greatest period of growth, and he was needed back in Nazareth.
CF Martin III and brother Herbert c. 1898
Although Frederick had served time at virtually every workstation on the factory floor, his education made him far more valuable in the office. Before he could spend much time there the United States finally became embroiled in “that awful German war,” and both Frederick and his younger brother answered the call. Poor eyesight kept C.F. III out of the army, and he instead volunteered for the army YMCA, served as a secretary for that organization in Georgia and later taught soldiers in North Carolina how to read. Another volunteer at the school in North Carolina was a young woman from Atlanta, Daisy Allen, whom Frederick married in 1920.
Martin factory workers c. 1906, Frank Henry Martin (2nd from left), Frederick (2nd from right)
Herbert on mandolin and Frederick on guitar, the only Martin family members known to have performed on the instruments that their family built
C. F. Martin III returned to the fold in Nazareth while the company was in the midst of its greatest period of expansion. The little Martin Guitar & Mandolin Company, prompted by Harry Hunt of the Ditson Company in New York and by Frank Hart’s Southern California Music Company in Los Angeles, had been one of the first to take advantage of America’s growing love affair with Hawaiian music and, specifically, the little ukulele. Frank Henry began making special instruments for both companies in 1916, which required an expansion of the factory the following year. In 1915, Martin hadn’t even been able to sell 200 guitars and only about 300 mandolins. By 1920, however, guitar sales were more than 1300, mandolin production topped 1500 and more than twice that many ukuleles were sold. Frank Henry and factory foreman John Deichman had their hands full training dozens of new workers and, thanks to the war, they could no longer count on finding German immigrants already skilled in fine woodworking. Herbert Keller, who had always been more handsome and self-assured than his older brother, went out on the road as a salesman for Martin’s ever-expanding line of fretted instruments. Frederick helped oversee production, but his most important role was as the chief correspondent in charge of answering the flood of mail that now streamed into Martin’s office.
While Frederick and his brother had been away at college and, later, fulfilling their obligations during WWI, their father had made some dramatic changes in how Martin conducted its business. Starting with Ditson and Southern California Music, Frank Henry had begun to build instruments for a number of different companies, including industry giant Wurlitzer, that were sold under their well-known trademarks rather than simply under the Martin brand. Many of these had special features unlike stock Martin models, and most of them had unique model codes as well. Needless to say, keeping all the different models straight for the flood of orders was no easy task, especially since many of the custom-brand accounts were also ordering stock Martin models at the same time. Martin was soon making every variation of ukulele imaginable: five soprano models, plus koa versions, taropatches and tiples. More than a half-dozen different mandolins were offered as well.
The Martin guitar line was even more confusing: the company was filling huge orders for its new Hawaiian and other steel-string models, now including tenor guitars, while still trying to keep its old gut-string customers happy. A look at Martin’s production log of the period is enough to make one dizzy, and in the midst of it all was Frederick, trying to keep the peace when orders were delayed, a ukulele was cracked in transit or a long-standing dealer was furious over new competitors on his turf. Twenty-five years later, when he was finally in charge of the company, C.F. III would greatly simplify Martin’s model line and sell its wares primarily through distributors; looking at the nightmare of confusion Frederick had faced when he came back to Nazareth with a new bride, it’s easy to see why he would do so.
Fortunately, the Martin Company has kept many of the files from this hectic period in its history. Always frugal, the office protocol was to type the answer to any correspondence using carbon paper so the back of the original letter had Martin’s reply copied on it. Despite being several months behind in production, Frederick still patiently answered virtually all requests for custom instruments, or sales pitches about a new patented improvement, no matter how outlandish. His replies were often something like this: yes, the plans for a self-tuning guitar are interesting, but the company is too busy to explore it further; or, sorry, because of the backload of orders for existing models we cannot entertain a custom order for a double-neck taropatch at this time. Some of Frederick’s correspondence with longtime favorites, such as American Guitar Society founder Vahdah Olcott Bickford, was downright cozy, with concerned reports on the health of their respective parents and shared seeds for their gardens. Regardless of the topic, C. F. Martin III was always polite without being condescending and, with most business letters, he stuck to the point of the matter without being dismissive. Compared to current business policies in the music industry–and especially compared to smash-mouth emails and online postings–Frederick’s letters to even the most combative customers were usually courtly in both manner and content.
The demand for ukuleles and steel-string guitars had led to another expansion of the Martin factory in 1924, with a second story being added to that new building the following year. Ukulele production peaked in 1926, with more than 14,000 of the little instruments sold that year alone. From that point on, the Hawaiian music craze began to decline, but Frederick and his father had far greater worries. In 1927 Herbert Keller died suddenly of peritonitis, and C.F.III was soon sent out on the road as Martin’s salesman. Retailers might have been surprised to meet Frederick after previously being called upon by his younger brother. Herbert had been closer to the stereotypical traveling salesman of the roaring ‘20s: single, confident, well-dressed and a bit of a ladies’ man. Frederick was well-dressed, but that was probably where the comparison ended.
Both C. F. III and his brother Herbert were in attendance at a Martin Company picnic in the summer of 1926. This is perhaps the last photo of them together, as Herbert died the following January.
In 1928, he hand-delivered a custom 000-45 to an entertainer who was performing in New York, and that guitar would have a tremendous influence on the company’s future. Jimmie Rodgers, widely credited as the Father of Country Music, had ordered his dream Martin with his name in bold block letters on the fretboard and his signature vocal style, “Blue Yodel,” lettered on the headstock. Rodgers would die of tuberculosis just a few years later, but the guitar continued to advertise for Martin for another four decades–in the hands of Ernest Tubb. Although Frederick wasn’t a fan of Rodgers’ music, he certainly recognized the man’s status and wrote a personal congratulatory note on a small paper label just inside the soundhole. Pearl-bordered Martins with the singer’s name inlayed on the fretboard quickly became the rage, and Gene Autry, who idolized Rodgers, ordered what is perhaps the most famous Martin guitar of all, the first D-45.
From the letters he left behind, it’s clear Frederick did as little as possible to boost the sale of such stage guitars. In one letter he cautions a young Autry that such decoration “would be purely ornament and would not improve the tone at all,” to which Autry probably muttered the 1930s equivalent of “well, duh” and then ordered another helping of flash. Other letters suggest that Frederick wasn’t a fan of the big dreadnoughts in general: “Frankly, we do not recommend a guitar as large as this because the tone becomes unbalanced, the bass being too heavy in proportion to the treble.” Even as late as the mid 1930s, Frederick still advised potential customers that the 0-28, Martin’s original concert model, “delivers the most pleasing, balanced tone.” Balance, whether in a business letter or in a guitar’s tone, was of utmost importance to C.F. Martin III.
And he had more on his mind than just Martin guitars and the men and women who made them. As his grandson later pointed out, Frederick’s role model was Woodrow Wilson; he considered himself a Wilsonian Democrat and he believed that a businessman should repay the community that supported his company with more than just the payroll. Frederick started the Lions Club in Nazareth and served as president of the school board. He also helped found the local YMCA, was on the hospital and library boards and aided in funding the library.
North Street factory in the early 1930s. The expansions on the left allowed for greater guitar production years later but were paid for by the ukulele boom of the 1920s.
The ukulele boom slowed dramatically in the late 1920s and then went bust–along with most of the rest of the music industry–when the Great Depression took hold. Frederick didn’t play much of a role in the innovations that sparked what is now considered Martin’s golden era. The 14-fret OM model and the resulting modernization of the dreadnought, two of the most copied guitar shapes in history, were the work of Frank Henry, Deichman and possibly others at the factory. But Frederick also had little to do with Martin’s now-notorious flops of the same period: its ill-conceived archtop guitar and mandolin models that paled in comparison to Gibson’s efforts. As Martin would prove again a few decades later, flattop fretted instruments were what it did best.
CF Martin III and family c. 1940
By the time the Depression loosened its grip, Frank Henry Martin was 70 years old. C.F. III now had two young children, Frank Herbert and Pamela, and as his father slowly retreated, he also had increased responsibilities at the factory. Frederick continued to serve a variety of civic functions in Nazareth, including chairing the local Selective Services Board, and made long walks (with lots of stairs) through the factory every day to check on his community of workers. But the renewed prosperity at the end of the Depression didn’t last long before the onset of World War II brought new challenges, both in terms of restrictions on the amount of brass and steel the company could use and in the loss of many key craftsmen to military duty. Martin’s archtop guitars, which needed heavy metal tailpieces, were the first to be discontinued and would never return. Many other Martin instruments were dropped from the price list, including the pearl-bordered guitar models, because of the difficulty in acquiring certain key supplies during the war years.
Frederick and Daisy's home as it looked in the 1940s. He lived here until his death in 1986.
Frank Henry Martin retired in 1945 and died just three years later. Now in his early 50s, C.F. III was fully in charge of the instrument factory he’d worked in for more than 30 years. Unlike his father, however, Frederick did not seek change and innovation. After the tumultuous years of the Depression and the long war, he sought stability for his workforce and found it in the steady demand for Martin guitars and ukuleles. Many of the instruments that had been discontinued during WWII were reinstated in the company’s catalog, such as tiples and the plainest of the carved-top mandolins, although the pearl-bordered guitar models that would later become the stuff of legend were not revived.
Although Martin is known for big Dreadnoughts and pearl bordering, the plain Style 0-15 introduced in 1940 is a better example of C.F. III's Spartan tastes.
Unlike Martin’s archtops, which fell victim to a lack of demand as much as to wartime restrictions, their 000-42 and D-45 models sold quite well in 1941 and ’42. Demand was high for fancy stage guitars, as witnessed by Gibson’s success with its big SJ-200, and the materials and talent needed to make pearl-bordered guitars was readily available. Despite the fact that most of the workers who had made the last D-45s less than a decade earlier were still on the payroll, Frederick kept the relatively Spartan D-28 as Martin’s highest model. Given the comments in Frederick’s earlier letters about the unnecessary “flash” of pearl-bordered guitars, one can’t help but wonder if leaving the fancier models out of the catalog wasn’t the new boss’ way of putting forth his own vision of the ideal Martin guitar. He didn’t drive fancy cars or wear flashy clothes and, perhaps unconsciously, his company’s guitars reflected a similar sensibility.
Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, C.F. III’s reluctance to change his company’s instruments meant that Martin guitars were pillars of quality–in terms of both materials and workmanship–in an industry looking for every possible shortcut that modern manufacturing could offer. Gibson even went so far as to use hollow injection-molded plastic bridges, fastened to the soundboard with machine screws, on all but its highest flattop models. Such visible compromises were only the tip of the iceberg; the rush made by Martin’s competitors to shave minutes from the total “build time” inevitably resulted in a slow and subtle degradation of tone in their guitars. In contrast, from 1947 until 1964 (when Martin moved from its old multistory North Street factory to a modern building on the outskirts of town) the changes in Martin guitars were limited to its tuners and to minor adjustments in pickguard and headstock shapes.
Frank Martin, his father CF III and Bob Johnson, c. 1962. This photo was intended to show Martin's wide range of guitars from the 0-16 NY to the new F-Series electric.
Frederick didn’t have it his way for very long because there was another engine of change named Frank Martin, one with a radically different head of steam than his grandfather, Frank Henry. Frank Herbert Martin, C.F. III’s son, had joined the company in 1955, the same year that C.F. IV (or Chris, the current CEO) was born. Frank Herbert had shown no interest in guitars (or the family company, for that matter), but his passion for sports and sports cars gave him little financial success; he turned to the family business out of pure necessity.
Around this time, the Martin Guitar Company saw an incredible growth in demand as a result of the folk revival. As American youth stampeded back in time to embrace the music of Depression-era hillbillies, union organizers and newly rediscovered blues singers, Frank led his company in a headlong rush to modernity in an effort to capitalize on the increased demand for acoustic guitars. One of his first moves was to hire salesmen that would take orders that Martin couldn’t fill. Kids were being told they’d have to wait up to two years for a D-28, and Frank Martin, perhaps more than any other Martin before him, knew what could happen to the dreams of youth in two short years. In 1963, the company’s last full year at the old factory, it sold approximately 6,000 guitars, about what production had been for more than a decade. In 1966, production was above 10,000, and by 1971, the year Frank Herbert replaced his father as president of the Martin Organisation, the number had more than doubled.
CF Martin III with his grandson, Chris c. 1970.
Frederick, in his late 70s at this stage, still made his daily rounds of all the workstations, while Frank and the rest of the front office crew rarely stepped off the carpeting. As acoustic guitar sales began to decline and the company’s debts from Frank Martin’s ill-advised expansions outside the guitar field became troubling, a new personnel manager (also named Frank) was hired to get the workforce in line. Instead of the traditional monthly meetings with management, the workers now received formal documents, written by lawyers, demanding numerous concessions over such issues as vacation days–and going to the parking lot to close your car windows when a thunderstorm rolls in. Martin’s guitar makers responded by joining the largest union they could find, an AFL-CIO affiliate that happened to represent workers at the local cement plant. A strike was called in September of 1977, and 180 Martin employees walked out. Unlike most strikes, salaries weren’t the issue.
The strike lasted eight long months. Frederick couldn’t bear to cross the picket lines in the parking lot and had someone drop him off at the front entrance instead. Whenever strikers were interviewed for the local press, they mentioned the difference between the current Martin leadership and the way Frederick treated them. Instead of letters from lawyers and closed doors to the front office, they were used to seeing “the Old Man,” as they affectionately called him (when he wasn’t within earshot), face to face almost daily. Frederick was stern and often critical–and perhaps his daily visits to each workbench weren’t always appreciated–but the workers never had to go looking for him. As one striker had mentioned, “He always found time to talk to you.”
Still on the job, CF III at the factory in the late 1970s
The strikers eventually rejected the union and came back to work, but it was a hollow victory for Frank Martin’s corporate style. By 1982, with annual sales below 5000 guitars per year and many workbenches cloaked in cobwebs, the board of directors had asked for his letter of resignation. C.F. Martin III had been grooming his grandson Chris in the earlier Martin tradition and, still chairman of the board at 90 years old, he prevailed in getting young Chris a position as a vice president in the wake of Frank’s departure. A year before his death in June of 1986, Frederick made a rare public appearance at the Symposium of American Lutherie held in nearby Easton, Pa., and spoke of his love for the primary material ingredient in his life’s work:
“I confess, I am in love with wood. Wood to me has personality. It talks to me in its grain, in its consistency, in its hardness or softness, in its music. The vibrating wood…just a plain reed vibrating in the wind is musical.”
There are a lot of instruments made at the old North Street factory–during C. F. Martin III’s long tenure–still vibrating out there today, guitars of all sizes and styles plus mandolins and ukuleles, playing every possible type of music all over the world. Their sheer number and variety represent an unparalleled legacy, and somewhere among all that music is the spirit of Frederick himself, a plain reed who didn’t start the Martin tradition, but who certainly kept it alive.
Sidebar
Dick Boak
Remembering C.F. III
by Harold Fethe
Returning to active work at Martin at an advanced age, C.F. Martin III took hardly any salary. He allowed his immense holdings of Martin company stock to be valued at zero, which enabled the company to pass muster with the banks that were descending upon them — and to avoid bankruptcy. Dick Boak (pictured here) has been a Martin employee for nearly 30 ears and is currently director of artist relations. Here he offers a few other snapshots of Fred Martin from a time when “the Old Man” was in is 80s and 90s:
Sales manager Dick Rusk got word from his reps that Johnny Cash wanted them to make him a Martin D-35, stained black. Fred Martin, a traditionalist who shunned custom projects, said “Absolutely not. We don’t make black guitars.” Not willing to give up, Rusk managed to get a black D-35 made clandestinely and delivered it to Cash. Later on, Martin happened to watch the opening episode of Columbo’s third season. In it, Johnny Cash played the role of Tommy Brown, a musician whose guitar was stolen, and the world’s only black Martin D-35 played the role of the world’s only black D-35! Afterward, C.F. III was good-natured about how he’d gotten the runaround in his own shop, saying, “Well, you put one over on me there.”
At one point, Martin was developing a 7/8-size dreadnought. Fred Martin happened by when it was being strung up. When strummed, it rattled, producing what violin makers sometimes call a wolf tone. Someone asked Fred if he could make any sense of the problem. He said, “My grandfather taught me, never have an area bigger than three inches by three inches that’s unsupported by a brace. This area here is too large. The angle of this tone bar seems to be too steep; should be more gradual.” A second prototype, built with Fred Martin’s changes, solved the problem.
Fred Martin happened upon the test of the scaled-down dreadnought because of his lifelong hands-on management style, which preceded the Management by Wandering Around prescription advocated by Tom Peters and other management gurus of the late 20th century. Boak says, “He would always walk around the entire plant, every day, and knew everybody by name. He was a little hunched over by then. I never knew why, but he would walk with his left hand behind his back, maybe with his thumb hooked into his left middle belt loop or the waist of his pants. People really appreciated his visits and the personal nature of his caring.”
Notoriously frugal, Fred Martin hated waste. During WWII, when graphite was scarce, he would fit copper tubing to impossibly short pencil ends around the Martin factory, to get the last use out of them. As long as he worked at Martin, he would regularly look through trash cans at workstations and, if he saw sandpaper he thought had not been fully used, he would pick it out of the trash and put it back on the workbench.
Describing how he liked to be treated, he frequently used the phrase “average Joe.” He never asked for, and never liked, being referred to as “Mr. Martin.” Boak describes a common scene where admiring workers and visitors to the Martin plant, out of respect and affection for him, would address him as “Mr. Martin.” He’d keep trying to get them to treat him like just another guy. In a typical exchange, he would say, “It’s all right–you can call me Fred.” The other person would say, “OK, Mr. Martin.”