Tom Martish: A Man of Principle
Here in the Driftless Region, far from the cesspools of political power and greed, there are still men and women of principle—individuals whom we must admire for their integrity, regardless of whether their views match our own. One such man is Tom Martish, 72, of Chicken Hollow.
Tom and I met a decade ago, through our mutual interest in the Hillsboro Public Library. He agreed to perform at a Friends of the Hillsboro Public Library “Drop-In,” playing an instrument of his own design that he termed “the world’s smallest guitar,” and singing songs he had written.
His songs, according to the Introduction to his self-published collection, “…[reflect] the more peaceful, happier life I’ve known since 1998, when I moved up here.” They include such paeans to his Driftless paradise as, “Hillsboro Morning,” “Totally Devoted to You,” and “Where the Hell is Yuba?”
Tom has since performed at the annual Hillsboro Musicale and at other events to benefit the library, as well as with like-minded groups, just for fun.
I knew a bit of Tom’s background from conversations we had when I occasionally drove him to his off-the-grid home, surrounded by Amish neighbors, in Chicken Hollow. (He doesn’t drive or own a car himself.) Intrigued by his lifestyle, I asked if he would agree to an interview for Driftless Now (DN). The following interview has been edited for publication.
DN: Tom, our readers would be interested in your early life and how you migrated to the Driftless Region.
Tom: I was born in the spring of 1948 into the most prosperous country ever, at the beginning of its most prosperous era. My parents fled Chicago to Skokie, a very middle-class suburb, when I was a year old. I got a great education in grammar school, middle school, and high school, before I dropped out senior year.
DN: It would have been uncommon, even in the 1960s for a student in the prosperous suburb of Skokie, Illinois, to drop out of high school. What were the circumstances?
Tom: I was fat, clumsy, shy, and traumatized by my home life, [and] school was miserable. I was bullied nonstop and scorned by the popular kids and picked last or totally rejected by the sports teams. So, I retreated into reading books, academics, and making up stories to tell to the “little kids” who would sit on the back steps and listen.
DN: You found an escape through storytelling. Did you know from the start that you were destined to be a creative person?
Tom: Because I was supposedly some kind of childhood genius (for my good grades and use of vocabulary words), my father, who was a fanatical member of the St. Paul’s Congregational Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, decided I was to be a Lutheran minister.
DN: Oh, you followed a path to the ministry?
Tom: By the time I was 14 or 15 years old and in a Lutheran Catechism class, I had come to hate the church and felt that Luther’s teachings were ugly. At about the age of 16, I refused to go to church anymore…
DN: You forsook organized religion?
Tom: …[at the age of] about 17, one of my sister’s boyfriend’s brothers introduced me to peacenik thinking and Quakers at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). I informed my father that I would never join the military.
DN: Your father was a veteran?
Tom: …[H]e was stationed in the Philippines after [WWII].
DN: What was his reaction to your refusal to join the military?
Tom: From that time on, he disowned me. He was by that time Plant Superintendent at a plastics factory. The first job he applied for in 1953 was feeding plastic pellets into a machine that extruded them into sheet plastic. He worked his way to being a multi-millionaire partner in a plastics business.
DN: His story was not atypical for a “Greatest Generation” guy, and your rebellion was not atypical for the “Baby Boomer” generation. Was your mom also a typical 1950s woman?
Tom: My mother was incapable of holding a job. Her family had been deserted by her father, her favorite brother died when she was young, and her other brother bullied her and didn’t talk to her for the last 45 years of her life. Her husband mercilessly belittled her and beat her. Her only son wasn’t all that much better, though I think he did try for years. (Her favorite names for me were “weird” and “nigger lover.”)
DN: Like many idealistic “Boomers,” you adopted a value system quite unlike that of your parents.
Tom: My personal belief system is pretty much that of a classic liberal—open-minded, inquiring, and, hopefully, open-hearted, compassionate toward all beings: humans, animal, plant, etc. I believe in not having irrational beliefs and do not like ideological, religious, patriotic, mystical, political, atheistic, supernatural, etc. thinking. Those kinds of thinking divide people up into warring camps. I like any thinking that says we are all in this together, that this life on earth and practical, simple reality are good enough and beautiful if we all work together at it.
DN: You were a young man of conviction. Who were some of your influences?
Tom: My main influences include Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., [and] Hans Selye, a doctor and scientist who came up with two rules I live by. To paraphrase: 1) Strive for excellence, not for perfection; and 2) Earn thy neighbor’s love, rather than love thy neighbor as thyself. His book, Stress Without Distress, is as close as I come to having a bible in my life.
[Additional influences include] Mahatma Gandhi, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, John Woolman (a Quaker), William Somerset Maugham, [and] Michal Pollen.
Eddie Kawolics [was a] come-from-behind bowler who said, “I’m a better man coming from behind” and then did just that on “Championship Bowling,” a television program circa 1955. A real oddball, he was “the last of the two-fingered bowlers” and threw the biggest possible hook ball down the alley).
[Also] Elenor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, and a personal friend, Ron Griswold, a psychologist who preached (very gently) community and communalism, and compassion for the weaker people.
More than anything else, psychedelic drugs (LSD) and the hippie era of the late 1960s shaped and focused my thinking.
I credit my father and his sister, my schoolteacher aunt (portrayed in the story, “The Ingrate”) for instilling in me a strong work ethic, and a high school English teacher, Paul M. Eberhardt, for my love of writing and thinking.
DN: You read extensively! I’m beginning to understand how the ideas of these great thinkers alienated you from your traditionalist parents, especially your father. He disowned you when you announced that you would not serve in the military. What happened then?
Tom: After being kicked out of the house and then bounced out of high school (for violating the rules of the work-study program by going to work when I hadn’t gone to classes), I moved into the basement of the house of a Belorussian family in the Chicago inner city.
DN: The Vietnam War was heating up at that time. What did the draft board have to say about your pacifist views?
Tom: In 1966 I became the first humanitarian conscientious objector (not by reason of religious training and belief) accepted and given 1-O status by the Evanston, Illinois draft board. I testified before three men that I would never allow myself to be trained to kill or aid others in being so trained. They asked me only a few questions like, “Does your religion forbid you to shave your beard?” I think that the hearing was just a formality, that the board was already convinced of my sincerity (lunacy to them) by an essay on my beliefs that I was required to submit beforehand.
DN: So, what was your obligation as a conscientious objector?
Tom: To do the required “alternative service,” I got a job working at a nursing home in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. After working there for a few months and observing how warehoused and over-medicated the residents were, I drew up a list of recommendations for better patient care and activities, including gardening, occupational therapy (manufacturing some simple product), discussion groups, recreational opportunities, arts and crafts shop, field trips to museums, etc. I was informed by the head manager of the place that there was “no money for other than the patients’ food and medicine.” (The nursing home was one of a half-dozen shut down in a scandal a year or two later.) I quit that job.
DN: You weren’t just “doing time” to fulfill a requirement as a conscientious objector; you tried to make a difference for the residents of the nursing home. How did your quitting that job affect your CO status?
Tom: When the draft board noticed, they summoned me to go in for a pre-induction physical. I went in drunk and drugged (rare for me in life; I’ve never been strong enough not to get sick with liquor and have seldom done drugs of any kind since the psychedelic 1960s) and scrawled obscenities on the forms. I was pulled out of line. When the board psychiatrist asked me, “What’s your problem?” my slurred answer was that I had no problem; I just didn’t want to kill anyone. I was reclassified 1-Y, available in time of national emergency, but found out soon afterward that the 1-O status ruled out the 1-Y. I never found other alternative service work and never heard from the draft board again.
DN: So, you had been disowned and kicked out of your family home, expelled from high school, deemed a conscientious objector by the draft board during the Vietnam War, and you were living in the basement of a Belorussian family in Chicago—not exactly a propitious start to adult life! You had to find yourself.
Tom: Nick Mikolai [middle son of the Belorussian family] took me traveling by thumb and bus—first to New York City in 1967, where I found life, warmth, and beauty during the Summer of Love, worked day-labor jobs, and lived in crash pads for almost two years. Then we hitchhiked up into Canada for a folk festival and lived in Toronto for the better part of a year.
DN: You hit the road, like Jack Kerouac.
Tom: After that, I returned to Chicago in the early 1970s. In 1970 I lied my way into Roosevelt University. When they caught on that I hadn’t finished high school, I took the General Education Diploma (GED) test and got legitimately into the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. At UICCC I took a music survey and another in anthropology, both of which opened up worlds to me that I walk in to this day. Unfortunately, I only lasted about a year there, the last of my formal education.
DN: But not the end of your life education…
Tom: From 1970 to 1975 I worked as a part-time shipper and receiver and night expediter for the South Side Chicago offices of Time, Inc., where I learned how to talk to people. (I’d been morbidly shy up to that time) and cooperate with and serve the office workers there.
DN: You were still in your mid-20s at that time. Those skills would prove valuable on any path your career would take you.
Tom: Sometime around then, I got an apartment with a high school friend, and we hitchhiked across the country and down the California coast together. In 1972 that same roomie and I bicycled (on ten-speed bikes) from Chicago to Montreal, a thousand miles, in 15 days, and then lived there for half a year or so.
DN: Those experiences must have greatly broadened your understanding of human nature and bolstered your self-confidence.
Tom: In 1976 I partnered with one of the editorial department workers on 32 acres of land in Kentucky (as described in the story, “Andi”) and lived there for a year and a half.
In the mid-to-late 1970s
DN: For a city boy to homestead in Kentucky took an extraordinary amount of courage and intelligence. You must have overcome the belittling you experienced at home.
Tom: Around that time—the late 1970s—I organized and ran two small businesses. First, for a few years, was an exterior painting crew, and later an office, apartment, and bar cleaning operation (“Wholistic Housekeeping”).
DN: Your exile from middle-class roots in Skokie forced you to learn survival skills and live on the edge.
Tom: Another major influence for me came in 1978, when I hitchhiked and bused to a community built around a desert hot springs and a deteriorating resort hotel outside the town of Eden, Arizona. The hotel was being rebuilt by the people of the Rainbow Tribe, the hippie coalition that organizes a gathering that draws thousands each year in different U.S. states. I went there with hope to recover from years of depression and a horrible chronic digestive condition. I tented out and saw a people who were working “miracles” of healing with simple food and alternative medicine. They were growing melons and vegetables with little irrigation in the desert. They had learned to co-exist with rattlesnakes and wild boars and were paying for the hundred acres of land with voluntary contributions from the doctors and ailing people who came there to heal or be healed. While there, I met a very large, super-friendly man with taped-up legs who told me he was a basketball player. I didn’t find out who he was until I was back working at Time, Inc. later that year and saw his picture in Time Magazine (not in Sports Illustrated). He was Billy Walton, who was rated as the best in the sport at that time. So, at that community I began the healing journey that I’m still on. Were I not a “health nut,” I’m sure I wouldn’t be alive at 72 and healthier than at any time in my life past the age of five or six years.
DN: So, you returned from the desert wilderness a changed man with a new outlook on nutrition.
Tom: In 1978, Time Inc. hired me a second time. I worked there for a year before taking a job at Food for People Co-Op grocery store on Chicago’s North Side.
DN: A move no doubt aligned with your new outlook on nutrition.
Tom: In the early 1980s I was drafted into plastering by a tough remodeling crew boss. I became the world’s greatest patch plasterer and drywall finisher.
DN: The short story, “Fancher,” in your book, Fancher and Other Stories of Songs of Love, provides some insight into that period of your life. As I recall, you were commuting between an intentional community in Missouri and your job in Chicago at the time.
Tom: [Yes,] from 1982 to 1992, after an unsuccessful homestead venture in Kansas and the two years as a cashier/manager for the Food For People Co-Op, I divided my life between remodeling work in the city and trying to build a house in an intentional community in Central Missouri. I also went to sign-painting school in the Chicago Loop in 1981 but never pursued that profession.
DN: You acquired a wide range of skills with all kinds of people—lots of grist for your creative writing mill.
Tom: Then, in about 1992, I was taken on as a copy editor at a business newspaper by the daughter of a lady whose house my crew was painting. Editing was the work I was really meant to do, but after three years I was pushed out by younger talent who could handle computers. But rewriting horridly written business articles gave me a love of clarity, continuity, and precise, impactful language.
DN: And those language skills, coupled with your eclectic background, helped to make you the writer you are today.
Tom: Work has always shaped me; I love giving all of myself to a task, whether it’s learning Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on the mini-guitar or cleaning a bar room toilet.
DN: Tell me about your “mini-guitar.”
Tom: Back in the 1980s, I had rediscovered the ukulele I’d bought a decade earlier. In the early 2000s I added a bass string to it, creating what I call a “mini-guitar.” I started writing songs in 2007. I’m developing a small repertoire of classical pieces for it and hope to convince the world that the instrument is great for a child’s first one and that for everyone it’s excellent for learning and composing melodies on.
DN: I’m starting to understand your writing and musical journey. How did you make the physical journey to the Driftless Region?
Tom: In 1997, Ron Griswold and I visited three intentional communities in Wisconsin, one of which was a startup in Chicken Hollow, seven miles south of Hillsboro, Wisconsin. In 1998 I met and married Sharon. We moved into an Amish-built mini-barn in Chicken Hollow.
DN: Where you live now… May I ask what happened?
Tom: The community never happened. For the three years of our marriage, Sharon and I tried to recruit people for our own community with no success. She went back to Pennsylvania to take care of her aged father, alcoholic, depressed mother, and self-destructive younger sister—and stayed. I wasn’t much of a husband, being at that time a workaholic, manic-depressive, and extremely sick, planning to die soon, and wanting time to work on the music and writing. So I bought her half of the five acres, and we made an “amicable split-up” that nevertheless hurt like hell for both of us. I still live in the totally remodeled, greatly expanded mini-barn.
DN: That was 22 years ago. How would you describe your life today?
Tom: My life today is a full one—homestead chores and cooking (on a wood stove) an all-organic, whole real foods diet, practicing on the mini-guitar, and writing songs and stories meant to entertain but also to tell of my life experiences and observations about people and my ideas concerning love and human behavior. The songs and stories are my children.
DN: Your songbook, Hillsboro Morning and Other Songs of a Denizen, and your latest book, Fancher and Other Stories and Songs of Love, are available at the Hillsboro Public Library. You have written them as a gift, with the proceeds going to the library.
Tom: I hope to leave [them] as a legacy, along with a book on simple ecological living. My message to the world is that we are all socialists, whether we admit it or not. Working together, cooperating, and sacrificing ourselves to each other and to the work of the hunt and the village allowed humans to survive and to come to dominate all other species. So now we have too much power over nature, and we could destroy the whole show with our wars and our exploitation of nature and each other. Our seemingly unending greed saddens and amazes me, and whether it takes a psychedelic awareness or a Bernie Sanders style remaking of our society and institutions, we have to get back to living like we realize we are all in this together.
Thank you, Tom Martish.
Bob Potter, contributing writer for Driftless Now, is interested in recording the tales of Driftless Region folks. If you care to share your story with our readers, please contact Bob at robertdaypotter@gmail.com.
