The Fact Finder

For his solidly researched series on desegregation problems in the Saturday Evening Post, Freelance Newsman John Bartlow Martin, 42, last week won the University of Illinois' Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award "for distinguished writing, involving original reporting in which serious obstacles had to be overcome." It was his fourth Franklin Award in five years--a record unmatched by any other writer.*

Martin's style is unpretentious, but as a fact finder he has few peers. Armed with a tiny Olivetti typewriter, a briefcase full of timetables, and a single suitcase, Martin spent 24 months on the segregation story, patiently persuading his sources--black and white alike--that he was neither a crusader nor a critic, spent three days in Summerton, S.C. convincing the head of the Citizens' Council that he just wanted to get the Council's side of the story. Back in his nine-room Victorian house in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Martin took another four months to write his series. He ground no personal ax, pleaded no man's cause, contented himself with a dispassionate report entitled: The Deep South Says "Never."

Martin graduated from DePauw (Ind.) University in 1937, was only a cub reporter on the Indianapolis Times when he cracked the freelance market with a $150 sale to the old Ken for an article on Dictator Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. After 20 years in the business, Martin can now pick his subjects and markets, draws top rates ($15,000 for the desegregation pieces). Meticulous and unhurried, he often writes first drafts 1,000 pages long, delights in the freedom of freelancing that has driven many another writer back to the certainty of the payroll. Says he: "I resist the bigness that's coming to the magazine field. I'm a 19th century man." In 1952 Democrat Martin wrote a campaign biography of Adlai Stevenson; in 1956 he was a Stevenson staff writer.

A friendly analyst of his native Midwest, Newsman Martin has turned his fact finding into eight books, but flopped the one time he tried a novel. (The publisher sent him a one-sentence comment: "You had better stick to nonfiction.") Says Martin: "I've always been interested in the individual human being and what happens to him in a society that really doesn't work as well as it should. I think that's the common denominator of my work. Sounds kind of pretentious, but I think it's so."

* Martin's previous winning stories, all for the Satevepost: The Riot at Jackson Prison, in 1953, the first year of the award: a four-part series on Nathan Leopold, in 1955; Inside the Asylum, an expose of mental hospitals in 1956.

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