|
<> 
St. EOM --
Eddie Owens Martin
by Tom Patterson
Eddie Owens Martin was born and
raised in Marion County, Georgia. Even as a
child he always felt somehow estranged, different from the other
God-fearing citizens in this part of the Bible Belt. He was the
archetypal kid who had his sights set on broader horizons. During his
youth the neighbors didn't take any particular notice of him, since he
was to all appearances just another barefoot boy in overalls.
But by the time of his death at age 77 he was well accustomed to being
regarded as the county's oddest character "that crazy old
fortune-teller Eddie Martin, who lives behind them weird-looking walls
out toward Cusseta."
Imagine if you can a cross between Walt Whitman, Sun Ra, the Aztec
emperor Montezuma, Lord Buckley and Boy George, and you begin to get an
idea of what sort of individual St. EOM was. An imposing figure,
barrel-chested and six feet tall, he hadn't cut his hair or trimmed his
beard in years, and what there was left of them was gray and worked
into braids that were pulled up and bound together at the top of his
skull.
His extensive wardrobe of ceremonial drag was made up of long flowing
robes and capes in brilliant multiple colors, candy-striped turbans and
feathered headdresses, boots and bracelets trimmed with bells and
seashells, naugahyde vests adorned with target shapes and tufts of
black horsehair, and other similarly flashy outfits. He usually wore
long sleeves to cover the blue tattoos running up and down each arm.
 So
what's the story on this St. EOM character? Who was he, and why did he
go to the trouble of building such things?
Martin was one of seven children born into a poor white trash
sharecropper's family shortly after the turn of the century, and he
wasn't the sort of boy who was about to be kept down on the farm. A
runaway at the tender age of 14, he hit the streets of New York at the
beginning of the Roaring Twenties.
Like many a starry-eyed country boy who has run away to the big city,
he turned to his only immediately available asset for making a living
in a place where farm skills meant nothing: his body. He spent his
first
dozen years in New York as a midnight-cowboy-style street hustler.
Later he made ends meet by running an illicit gambling parlor, dealing
marijuana, working as a waiter in a gay nightclub, and finally by
establishing himself as a fortune-teller on 42nd Street. By the time he
was 30 years old he had decided that his real calling in life was art,
and he spent much of his time during his last 20 years in New York
producing paintings and drawings which he was consistently unsuccessful
in selling.
 In
many ways he was a man ahead of his time. Long before the eras of the
beats, the rock-n-rollers, the hippies and the new-wavers, Martin had
done it all hitchhiking and freight-hopping across America, wearing
strange clothes and hairstyles, dodging the draft, freewheeling sexual
experimentation, dabbling in Eastern religions and the occult.
When he finally returned to Georgia in the late 1950s, it wasn't to
blend in discreetly with the rest of the local population, but rather
to establish himself as a proudly hermetic recluse in self-imposed
exile from the larger American society. He maintained that posture for
30 years, continuing to tell fortunes for a living while he built the
Paradiso of his dreams.
He was a man who felt he had something to prove, and his way of proving
it was to create one of the most distinctive environmental artworks in
America, a site which is comparable in range and scope and weirdness
only to a few others in this country: Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los
Angeles, Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden in Kansas, and Howard Finster's
Paradise Garden, also in Georgia.
Never one to feign humility, St. EOM bitched until his dying day that
he didn't receive the recognition he was due as an artist. During St.
EOM's last few years at Pasaquan his health began to decline along with
his spirits. Then in April of 1986 he brought his extraordinary career
to its startling conclusion with a single bullet from a .38-caliber
pistol.
Excerpted
from Tom Patterson's book, St. EOM
in the Land of the Pasaquan
(1987, The Jargon
Society).
Click
image for Hotel Info
Click
image for Golf Info
Click
image for St. Augustine Info
Click
image for Beach Info
Special Thanks to the
Steering Committee
of the
BGHS
Class of 1970-1971-1972 and Friends Reunion:
|
|
