Jackie Martin

She achieved recognition as the first official photographer and public relations officer for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and the first to wear a WAAC uniform. She received awards for her photography, for her work as a war correspondent, and for her internationally-recognized lifetime achievements in journalism.

• Name — Jackie Martin • Birth Name — Cecilia Barber Martin • Born — 1 April 1903 • Birthplace — Braddock, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 15 December 1969 • Place of death — Washington, D.C., U.S. • Resting Place — Rock Creek Cemetery • Field — Photography, Journalism,

Martin was educated in the public schools of Washington, D.C. The curator of a 1986 exhibit called "Jackie Martin, The Washington Years" wrote that after convincing the administration to allow it she became the first girl in her elementary school to take an industrial arts class. She attended Eastern High School between 1918 and 1921 and upon graduating received an athletic scholarship amounting to a year's college tuition. Lacking money to pay room, board, and other essentials that were not covered by the scholarship, she spent a year working in a sequence of retail jobs, including one as editor of a department store magazine. In the fall of 1922 Martin enrolled in Syracuse University and during her freshman year she earned letters in basketball, track, and rifle shooting. Although she took jobs on campus and set up a laundry pick-up service, she was unable to earn enough money to continue beyond the first year.

Martin became a professional journalist at age 20 when, having returned home from Syracuse, she used her experience as editor and athlete to obtain the position of sports editor for the Washington Times. In 1969 her obituary stated that in taking the job she became the first ever woman sports editor at a daily paper, however, it is more accurate to say that she was the first woman editor of a major metropolitan daily since in 1906 a woman named Ina Eloise Young had become "sporting editor" of the Chronicle-News of Trinidad, Colorado. During 1925 and 1926, while still working at the Times, Martin also worked as society editor in the Washington office of a photo publishing and news photography company called Underwood & Underwood. It was during this time that she learned the basics of photojournalism. In 1926 she left Underwood & Underwood and shifted from sports editor on the Times to a three-month position as staff photographer in the joint newsroom of the Times and its sister publication the Washington Herald. During 1928 and 1929 she spent another few months as the Herald's assistant society editor. In March 1929 Martin joined the Washington Daily News and for the next year and a half was one of its staff photographers and feature news reporters while also handling special editions and filling in as society editor.

While she was sports editor of the Times and society editor at Underwood & Underwood Martin had a third job as publicity manager for a women's sports club, the Metropolitan Athletic Club, and was a starting member of its basketball team, the Mets. The team had an unbeaten season in 1924, thus earning recognition as District of Columbia basketball champions. During this time she was an officer of the organization that coordinated women's basketball locally and in addition to all her other activities she taught basketball classes two evenings a week in a local gym. On leaving her job as staff photographer for the Times and Herald in 1927, Martin became manager and publicist for a multipurpose arena sports arena that aimed to be the "Madison Square Garden of Washington." At this time she was also manager and coach of a women's professional basketball team, the Arcadians, which played its home games at the arena. The team attracted local notice by playing local boys' teams using men's rules. They competed in preliminary events before games of the men's professional teams and were said to be one of the first if not the first professional women's team. Martin hoped to compete in half-mile event of the 1928 Olympics, the first in which women would be competing in track events. She was forced to withdraw, however, when injured during the U.S. track championships which were held in Newark, New Jersey as the country's Olympic trials.

• Illustration — Jackie Martin, photo of two farm women and their dog, taken in the mountains of east Tennessee in 1936 On leaving the Daily News in September 1930 Martin returned to the Herald as feature editor and photographer. She soon added picture editor to her responsibilities at the paper and, when owner William Randolph Hearst merged the offices of the Herald with those of the Times, she served in the same capacity for both papers. With this appointment Martin became the first woman to hold these management positions on a metropolitan newspaper. At that time she directed a staff of about a dozen men responsible for covering straight news, society, fashions, theaters, and sports in two or more pages of photos each day. Martin's mentor and boss was the paper's domineering and mercurial editor, Cissy Patterson. One author says that in the 1930s Martin was often credited with "almost single-handedly transforming William Randolph Hearst's tired Herald into what was to become Cissy Patterson's sleek, eye-catching Times-Herald." In 1936 Martin and Patterson visited a rural section of Tennessee and North Carolina to produce a series of six articles called "Dixie's Dead End." One of the articles described the hardships faced by two elderly farm women at the height of the depression. The image at left comes from this shoot. In August 1940 Martin left the Times-Herald to begin a career as freelance photographer, publicist, war correspondent, lecturer, and magazine editor. Between 1940 and 1944 she seems never to have been at rest. At the beginning of that period she spent two seasons crossing the country as a paid lecturer as well as managing an advertising campaign for the Chrysler Corporation. She next traveled by air across Brazil to shoot aerial and ground photos for two books profiling that country. In the winter months of 1941 and spring of 1942 she set up a photo department for the Washington bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times and began work as associate editor of the Woman's Home Companion. During the second half of 1942 she served as photographer and publicist for the first group of women to enter military service with the Army. In 1944 she obtained a contract from the Macmillan publishing company (of New York) for a book about nurses in the U.S. Army and was sent to Italy as war correspondent for Ladies' Home Journal. Given the opportunity to witness the invasion of southern France, she broke the Macmillan contract and accompanied the 7th Army in its liberation of Marseilles, Lyon, and Toulon. During the war years Martin contributed freelance photos and features to widely-circulated U.S. magazines, including Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Look. She continued to produce freelance photojournalism after her return from Europe in 1945. For example, in May and June of that year she published articles in the Washington Star on the physical appearance of Army nurses ("Nurses Are Pretty," May 27, 1945) and on the friendliness of servicemen towards the children they encountered behind the lines ("Soldiers and Kids," June 3, 1945). The following year she served as feature editor and photographer in the Washington office of International News Photos and as photographer for King Features Syndicate, both owned by William Randolph Hearst for whom she had worked at the beginning of her career in journalism. She also resumed lecturing, this time under the auspices of the W. Colston Leigh Bureau. Throughout the 1940s Martin had done freelance work for Parade magazine and continued that work into the early 1950s. After 1952 Martin did little or no freelance work as she was by then stationed in Europe as a full-time employee of the United States Foreign Service.

Martin was adept at making and keeping connections with others, whether they be friends, acquaintances, or business associates. Many of these connections were with women who, like herself, believed in the ability of affinity groups to assist the advance of women in professional and cultural affairs. As a first year student she joined the Delta Gamma sorority at Syracuse University and retained her membership through the rest of her life. In 1932 she was a founding member of the Washington Newspaper Women's Club and continued to be active in it for the rest of her career. Earlier she had joined the organization from which that club broke off, the Women's National Press Club. She regularly participated in the Press Club's satirical stunt nights and often drafted, composed, and performed in their skits. In 1936 she was elected to be an associate member to the Royal Photographic Society of England. Martin became the first female member of the White House News Photographers Association in 1942. Six years later she became an associate member of Theta Sigma Phi, a national professional and honorary fraternity for women in journalism. In 1955 she was elected second vice president of the Newspaper Women's Club. News accounts of the Washington social scene contain frequent mentions of her participation in club events and in June 1940 she gave an outdoor party for members of the two women's press clubs that featured hot dogs, steaks, a keg of beer, and, according to one account, "singing and much gay talk."

When Martin returned from Paris she was reported to be worn down and hoping to retire. At the insistence of her brother, Philip Martin, Jr., she nonetheless agreed to help run the Washington media company he directed. This was Norwood Studios, a motion picture production facility that specialized in government and commercial documentaries. In 1960 she became the company's vice president, and, according to one account, helped to make the firm the largest producer of documentary films south of New York.

Martin was born on April 1, 1903, in Braddock, Pennsylvania, to Philip Martin (1877–1954) and Emma Fredrica S. Herman Martin (1877–1962). Named after her paternal grandmother, Cecilia Barber Martin of Cornwall, England, her birth name was Cecilia Barber Martin. Philip Martin was a munitions expert who worked in Pittsburgh during Martin's childhood and who moved the family to Washington, D.C., during World War I in order to take a position as supervising engineer in the Old Soldiers' Home. Emma Martin was a Christian Scientist who was chaplain for the Columbia Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and sometime president of the Capitol Hill History Club. Martin had two sisters, Lydia (1900–1983) and Lillian (1908–2002), and a brother, Philip, Jr. (1916–1974). Lydia was a secretary before her marriage to a Soldiers' Home mortician, William P. Pugh. Lillian, like Martin, took a masculine nickname (Jerry) and was both an athlete and news reporter. In 1929 after working alongside Martin at the Washington Times and the Herald, she married a physician, William H. Clements, and subsequently managed his private practice in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Philip Martin, Jr., was a well-known motion picture producer of New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C. He owned and directed Norwood Studios, Inc., where Martin was vice president in the early 1960s. Martin lived in her parents' house at the Soldiers' Home until, at the age of 40, she bought a house in Georgetown. She left her papers and other archives to Syracuse University. A Syracuse archivist points out that although the collections are extensive and in other respects comprehensive, they contain little gossip about Martin's relations with other people and almost nothing about her private life. In 1932 her parents announced her engagement to a man named B. Wheeler Johnson, but there was apparently no marriage. One source notes rumors of a romantic relationship with Cissy Patterson. Another says of Patterson: "While she was editing the Times-Herald, she was carrying on a lesbian romance with the paper's picture editor." The curator of a 1986 exhibit about Martin's years in Washington contains this statement about her public presence: From her school days at Eastern High in Washington, D.C., to her time as a war correspondent, articles about Jackie Martin appeared in the press. While the setting might be the Delta Gamma sorority house near the Syracuse University campus, the Lindberg baby trial, the Matta Grosso in Brazil, or the Seventh Army's campaign through France, the story is the same. Plucky, diminutive, dynamic, trustworthy—especially that; ladylike, fair, self-made, hardworking photog, our girl returns from some assignment or is off to one. We can reassuredly look forward to what Jackie—the press referred to her by that somewhat androgynous nickname—has photographed. No surprises. No rude awakenings to the world's threatening otherness. The curator adds that despite a decline in health that began during her wartime experiences, she continued to project youth and vigor even as she aged. Martin died following a long illness, at the age of 65, on December 15, 1969, and was buried in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery.

She adopted the nickname Jack while young and used it as an adolescent, expanding it to Jackie when in her mid-twenties. From the mid-twenties onward she was almost always referred to as Jackie Martin and only occasionally as Cecilia Martin or Cecilia B. Martin.