He was preceded in death by his loving wife, Janet Deane Beck, Wichita; his brother Warren Beck, California; his mother Delle Shafer Beck and stepfather Ray Beck, both of California. Survivors include his daughter and only child, Mary Ellen Moore, Wichita; his brother Carlton Beck, Nevada; his two brothers John Beck and Larry Beck, California.
Martin was born in San Diego, California and as an adult shared many interesting stories of his life growing up during the Depression Era in the town of Needles, near the Mojave Desert. He was close to his maternal grandparents who helped raise him for a portion of his childhood.
He joined the U.S. Navy at a young age and served during both the Korean conflict and peacetime, working with an Air Transport Squadron carrying out aviation electronics duties as a radio communications operator on naval plane flights, and as a medical corpsman for a lesser period of time. His military service afforded him the opportunity to briefly visit and experience the cultures of numerous countries while on shore leave.
Following honorable discharge, he traveled across the country, beginning in California and stopping in Lawrence, Kansas, where he met Janet L. Deane at the University of Kansas while she was attending as a graduate student of English Literature, a subject for which he subsequently developed a shared interest. Martin also attended K.U. as an undergraduate for a short time. Following their marriage in Lawrence, they moved to Wichita where Janet’s parents lived.
A few years later, when their daughter was a year old, they moved to Bakersfield, California where Martin’s immediate family members resided. While living in California, Martin, Janet, and Mary enjoyed several vacation trips to coastal towns along the Pacific Ocean and camping in the Sequoia National Forest.
Eleven years later, Martin and Janet returned with Mary to Wichita, Kansas to live with Janet’s father following the passing of Janet’s mother. Both Martin and Janet spent the remainder of their lives residing in Wichita.
Martin held several jobs over the years, including as a pipefitter; as an Instrument Technician with Schlumberger Oil company executing numerous duties including modifications, troubleshooting, radiation detection system circuitry, component testing, scope and film readout and recording, research and technical writing, instruction methodology and programming of theoretical and applied electronics, and establishing a technical engineering library. He was later employed maintaining and operating the camera and running broadcast programming at a television station; and he also free-lanced in carpentry and building custom electronics equipment. Additionally, on occasion he had gigs playing piano in nightclubs over several years.
Martin was intellectually inquisitive and read widely in a variety of subject matter, including microbiology; entomology; zoology; cryptography; radio astronomy; electronics; science fiction; World War II; and the history of medicine, surgery, and infectious disease. He admired and read biographies of Nikola Tesla, the legendary inventor in the field of electricity. A few of his favorite fiction authors were Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
He introduced his daughter to the study of insects and spiders which they pursued together over the years. He loved watching science fiction films and was also an avid aficionado of basketball, being a devoted fan of the Kansas Jayhawks. Martin was gifted with several talents and aptitudes, such as the ability to play piano by ear in the musical styles of boogie-woogie, blues, jazz, and swing; jitterbug dancing; drawing; composition of poetic verse; code deciphering; and advanced mathematics. His hobbies included woodworking; black and white 35 mm photography; acrostics and crossword puzzles. His favorite holidays were Christmas and Halloween.
Martin, Janet, and Mary enjoyed humor, wordplay, a deep appreciation for wildlife; and they shared their home with many companion cats and dogs over their lifetimes. Martin especially found owls, tigers, meerkats, insects, and reptiles intriguing and endearing, but was most fond of elephants for whom he had a profound reverence. At one time he had a diverse collection of elephant figurines.
For his entire adult life, Martin’s primary passion was amateur radio (aka ham radio), which he pursued with great enthusiasm, beginning with membership in the Military Amateur Radio Service and continuing as a civilian maintaining his license for over sixty years while acquiring and establishing an elaborate amateur radio station at home. He was skilled in sending and reading morse code and enjoyed connecting and conversing over the air with other amateur radio operators across the U. S. and around the world as well as keeping up with and exploring innovations in the field himself, such as bouncing radio waves off the moon. He excelled at designing, drafting, and constructing standard and original radio communication equipment and published several articles in an amateur radio magazine.
From time to time, Martin volunteered in the community, including with the neighborhood clean-up project and as an election poll worker. He was helpful to an elderly neighbor, performing a considerable amount of home maintenance assistance to her during her last fifteen years of life. For a number of summers, he enjoyed growing tomatoes and cucumbers in the backyard garden patch. He also found it gratifying to build a diverse array of items such wooden clocks and furniture, some of which he gave to family, as well as sold and donated to others. When his daughter was young, he built her a brick sandbox, a large dollhouse, and when she was in college, they created together a deluxe set of children’s building blocks for a classroom assignment.
Martin succeeded in overcoming some of the daunting and painful personal challenges and hardships he experienced throughout his life and he offered support to others contending with their own similar adversities. He had an intense personality; socially he was a dual combination of introvert and extrovert, and in each sense he lived life with gusto. He was creative; imaginative; analytical; insightful; witty; resourceful; generous when able, donating in later life to many charities; and he especially derived pleasure in making people smile and laugh by engaging in levity.
Martin’s cremains will be scattered into the Pacific Ocean from a naval ship off the port of San Diego—his place of birth--through the Navy’s Burial At Sea program for veterans.
In his memory, relatives, friends, acquaintances and interested others are encouraged to engage in mentoring; tutoring; documenting history; preserving vintage naval vessels; advocating for veterans, with particular emphasis on treating PTSD; and/or making donations in his name to the following esteemed nonprofit organizations: Doctors Without Borders; the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee (www.elephants.com); the Performing Animal Welfare Society Ark sanctuary in northern California (www.pawsweb.org); the David Sheldrick orphan elephant and rhino rescue/rehabilitation center in Kenya, Africa (www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org) or the Wichita Amateur Radio Club (www.warc1.org).
*Obituary written by Martin’s and Janet’s daughter, Mary Moore, November 2019
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