Noel Edward Martin

From impoverished beginnings in pre-Confederation Newfoundland, where he had been born into a dysfunctional family, Noel, the second oldest in a family of seven children, moved to Toronto, Ontario in his early twenties to find work.  Circumstances had precluded the possibility of the higher education for which his talents seemed to have destined him.  Never a quitter, he persevered, educating himself through voracious reading and self-study and over-time found his own unique way to achieve the respectability and financial independence to which he had always aspired.  Because of his rough background, from which he sought to free himself, his focus had always been on his own family, their happiness, well-being and stability. After tragically losing his beloved wife, Anne, to cancer at just forty-four , he was left with son, Greg twenty, and daughter, Cynthia, barely in her teens, still living at home.  The family held together and today he is immensely proud of them, their families, and their achievements.

After a thirty-one year career with a major manufacturer of consumer products in Toronto, Noel retired at fifty-four and eventually moved north to Meaford, Ontario where he lived for seven years.  The next move was to Owen Sound, where he had met, and is now happily married to, his second wife ,well known artist Carol-Ann Barrett.

Do you have to be famous to write an interesting autobiography?  Noel doesn’t think so.  His self-taught hobbies of drawing cartoons, writing poetry and short stories (not widely published) and organizing practical jokes, have always had a way of putting him front and centre with his friends and contemporaries.  In later years, he took up oil painting finding another medium in which he also has achieved considerable mastery.  Believing no complete life story can be written before you are dead, Noel delayed his as long as he dared and wrote his book, “UP IN THE BOTTOM…A Newfoundlander’s Life Journey”, in his seventy-fifth year, undergoing Thyroid Cancer surgery just before its publication.  The operation appears to have been a success, and the book…well, things are looking positive there too.