Several thousand feet of aluminum foil, a man-sized hamster wheel, a six-foot rubber duck, a closet replica, and a fake 50th. These Martin pranks were capped with Snow Rave, a New Year’s Eve ball drop. All occurred in the early 2000s, but The Martin has deeper roots in large-scale pranks. The building started as one.
In the lead-up to prohibition, James “Old Man” Martin, a wealthy distiller, was an outspoken critic of the 18th amendment and the Volstead Act. Luckily for him, he had other interests– logging, construction, hardware, and more money than anyone else in Olympia.
It's hard to believe that between 1920 and 1933, there were no legal public places to drink in Olympia, let alone anywhere else in America. James purchased the parcel the same week that prohibition started. The building was fully completed in 1923. On Christmas morning that year, he gave twenty of his favorite family members a small gift-wrapped box. Inside was a key that opened a fully-furnished apartment. He kept the largest one for himself.
There were no beds. Every room was either a dining room, a living room, or in the case of the studios, both. Each unit came with one very large, fully-stocked bar.
The original Martin residents owned houses outside of Thurston County in remote rural areas and for the next ten years, when in town, their apartments served as a prohibition workaround.
The first rentals didn’t occur until after World War Two. By the 1970s, there were only a few Martin family members with their original keys. It was around this time that Jack took over as the first super.
At the heart of Jack’s philosophy was welcoming people. He leased to those who were having a hard time renting. He didn’t do background checks, credit checks, or reference checks. He didn’t care how old a person was. Many of the young people who lived in the Martin in the 1980s and 1990s were major forces in the indie music revolution that started in Olympia, spread around the world, and became known as Grunge.
I met Jack in 1991. It was ten years before I moved into the building. I had no idea I was meeting my future self.
Jack and I bonded over our shared love for old mechanical things, specifically typewriters. I had just bought a 1938 Smith-Corona Sterling at Goodwill for ten dollars. It had its original seal, which meant it had never been used, but I didn’t realize this. All I knew was it didn’t work. When I brought it to Jack, he almost cried. He was in awe– not just because I had this particular typewriter, not just that I paid only ten dollars for it– the typewriter was in mint condition. Jack had never touched one like this. He initially tried to convince me to not use it, to sell it to a collector who would keep it on a shelf or put it in a museum. Then Jack changed his mind. He appreciated that I was a young writer and wanted to use it, to write, to start my career. I broke the seal.
Over the years, Jack was more than my mechanic, he was a mentor, and in more ways than I would know for a while. He held court at Reliable Office Equipment, his repair shop on Legion. Even when I had no reason for going in, I’d drop by just to look at the assorted gizmos on the shelves, observe the wizard at work, and talk to the curious characters who hung around there. Jack was a performer, and his show was a mechanical menagerie.
Today, I do most of my writing on a yellow 1973 IBM Selectric, but thanks to Jack, the Smith Corona is still humming. Jack died peacefully in his Martin apartment in 1997.
I’ve made continuing Jack’s magic a priority. Initially, that manifested in decorating the halls with ornate mandalas built out of lovely-looking junk and spare parts. I hosted illegal picnics and unsanctioned barbecues in parking spaces. I had a nightly fully-legal poker game. I set up eight phone booths on the sidewalk (each paired with another). I started a neighborhood flea market where I rolled out the first Flat Win Products.
I also moved in all my friends.
This is what really sparked the increase in good-humored mayhem, one not limited to consuming alcohol or renting to minors. Our mayhem was heavy on absurdity.
I can only take credit for orchestrating about half it, but I can take credit for making the fertile ground, encouraging and permitting all of it.
THE PARTY
T________ was the driver of a massive party in The Martin. Before it happened, we all knew it was going to be a one-time thing. Nothing big was damaged, but the party was big. It gave everyone a tangible sense of the meaning of the number one thousand.
Before the night got going, V________ had volunteered to remain at the front door. He liked being a bouncer, but he also loved statistics. He kept a count going. At the height of the party, there was an announcement, we had just achieved our goal. There were one thousand people in The Martin.
Most of them were in the halls. The lights were off, there were smoke machines going, lasers, strobe lights, a DJ at the end of the south hall, and a different one at the end of the north hall. Many of the apartments were operating take-out windows, selling food, drinks, or in my case, pre-packaged combs, twigs and burnt toast.
Afterwards, there was widespread agreement to never do this again. It was time for a new era, the golden age of large scale-pranks started the following winter.
THE FOIL
G________ was going away for a week. Within an hour of his departure, a group of his friends worked in secret inside his apartment around the clock. The scale of this first major prank is captured in the photos, but really, you had to walk around inside it to feel its colossal iridescence. Individual coins, books, CDs, utensils and even a roll of toilet paper were consumed in a perfect dazzling silver coat. To this day, a small area of the apartment remains wrapped in foil.
THE HAMSTER WHEEL
L_______ was one of the main architects of the foil prank, but at the time didn’t live in the building. We saw a golden opportunity when he signed his lease from out of state. It gave us time to prepare. K________ was the primary architect on this one, and had the custom welding completed at his expense. When L________ arrived at the apartment, he found an adorable suit hanging on the front door. Once in the suit, he entered the apartment and waded through shredded newspaper that was three-feet deep. There was a large beach ball and a ten-gallon bowl of cheese doodles. In the window, a five-gallon plastic watercooler hung from the roof. This was a man-sized water feeder fitted with a three-inch PVC pipe with a racquetball stuck in its end. When he tapped the ball, L________ got a splash of water.
THE GIANT DUCK
M________ was the genius behind the prank on K________ who had an enormous collection of small rubber ducks. When K________ was switching apartments, before he moved into the new place, there was a similar period of a few days when she coordinated the Styrofoam sculpture and painting project. I supplied the three-hundred-gallon horse trough as the pond. All of K________’s small ducks were neatly arranged to appear to be worshipping their god.
THE FAKE CLOSET
The bridges were burnt now. The next pranks required a fresh, more subtle approach. G________’s apartment had a closet door next to the front door. There had been a long-running joke that likely extended back to the 1920s about how the two doors were so identical that surely someone had accidentally confused them. In secret, a group built an exact replica of the closet. When it was finished, late at night when G________ was asleep, all of the contents of the actual closet were taken out into the hallway and placed into the fake one, which was then affixed with duct tape to the outside of the exit door. The next morning, people waited in the hall for G________ to leave for work. After he opened his door, he spent about sixty-seconds in a Twilight Zone fugue state.
THE FAKE FIFTY
The most subtle of all the major pranks is my favorite one. The targets were about a dozen people. J________ went around knocking on doors, having people sign a 50th birthday card for P________. He also collected money for a present, a 30-can “suitcase” of Milwaukee’s Best, supposedly P________’s favorite beer. Over the next week, everyone he collected from went into different versions of intense acute depression. T________ even gave notice, writing, “Look, it’s still twelve years away for me, but I need to grow up, I can’t turn fifty here with you people…” Everyone went to the dreaded party. When J________ let the cat out of the bag, 39-year old P________ was outraged that they all thought he could pass for fifty.
THE SNOW RAVE
A year before Snow Rave happened, the City’s public events department apologized to me for wrongly shutting down our flea market. That’s a whole other story, but the short version is that a certain notoriously angry fancy shop didn’t like what we were doing, and pulled some strings. Later, the City said, if I applied, they’d approve my next event. I didn’t want to do another flea market. I did want to do something for New Year’s. They reluctantly issued the permit. We started doing publicity in August. All of it mentioned both a ball drop and multiple snow machines that promised to turn the neighborhood into a winter wonderland. On December 31, 2011, we set up a large sound system from all four buildings at the intersection and staged all the secret stuff on the roof of The Martin. At the stroke of midnight, with a crowd over two-thousand dancing in the street, a dozen people, each with a tennis racquet, began rapidly swatting solid white twenty-inch beach balls onto the crowd.
THE FUTURE
The fun hasn’t stopped. It has only evolved. For every bridge we’ve burned, we’ve built ten new ones. We’ve stretched out into increasingly subtle and creative manifestations of the original magic that started this place. I love this building and look forward to its next 101 years.
