One day, young Bob got an idea: He and his best friend, Willie, would ride their bikes down to the river and rent a boat. When they got there, Martin says, “I looked up at the sign, and it said, ‘25 cents an hour to rent boats.’ I said I have enough money. Let’s go rent us a boat.”
Martin and Willie walked over to where a man was renting boats.
“ ‘Look, I can’t rent you one of these boats,’ ” the white man said. “ ‘You have to have a $5 deposit, plus 25 cents an hour to rent these boats.’ ”
The year was 1942. That was big money then for a boy of 12.
“Is it okay if I come back next week?” Martin asked.
“Five-dollar deposit plus 25 cents an hour,” the man responded.
He said it just like that. “Very cold.”
The next week, Martin worked his rear end off as a delivery boy. Again, he and Willie rode their bicycles down to the river. Martin told the man he had the $5 deposit.
“That man looked at me dead in the eye, just like I’m looking at you now and said, ‘I don’t know why you keep running around here talking about renting a boat. We don’t rent these boats to no [racial slur].’ ”
And tears just rolled down young Bob’s face.
Dressed in a white commodore uniform, Martin, now 81, is sitting in the clubhouse of the Seafarers Yacht Club, which started an annual Anacostia River cleanup in 1985. The bar is empty, and a fan blows a hot breeze. Outside, the Anacostia River keeps rhythm as Martin tells the story of how he came to establish the club, which has 42 members, the youngest 32, according to Andre Briscoe, 48, the club’s current commodore.
Martin taps a card on the table. “I know what it feels like to want to ride a boat,” Martin says. He smiles, but his charm masks a steely resolve.
You can tell it is important to him to finish the story. Martin’s father was a laborer. His mother stayed home. Martin was the middle child of five. He grew up in a house on 12th Street NE, which he calls a “no, no, no house. No electric, no bath, no nothing. ... Everything was a no for a black man or a colored person at the time.”
But he did not let circumstances define him. “I said, ‘I’m going to get me a boat if that is the last thing I do,’ ” he says.
The pharmacist, “Dr. Read,” for whom Martin worked delivering prescriptions, told Martin that his daughter would let him use her garage as a workshop if he kept her coal bin filled.
Deal, Martin said. During the day at the drugstore, Martin would stand at the news rack, studying drawings of boats in Popular Mechanics magazine. He bought wood and built a boat frame.
Loading...
Comments