MARTY ROBBINS BEFORE AND AFTER THE NAVY
Here’s a paragraph in my biography draft that I originally placed in the section on Martin as a teenager before he enlisted in the Navy:
***He and his half dozen friends “were trying to have fun,” he said. “We’d choose up sides and have fights with the oranges. Or olives. . . . You can hurt a person by shooting a green olive at him [with a slingshot].” Marty described in an interview the day they carried their fight all the way through town and out into the cemetery. One friend peeked up over a gravestone just as another threw a green orange as hard as a baseball; it hit him between the eyes and knocked him out. “We thought it’d killed him, cuz he just made a few quivering motions with his legs, y’know,” Marty recalled, laughing. “We run over to him, slapped him around, wake up, wake up, are you dead? Finally he came to, but he had closed eyes.”***
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MARTY ROBBINS, THE NAME
Marty once told Ralph Emery he got the name Marty Robbins from “a Russian kid by the name of Harry Tomichov” [phonetic spelling]. He wanted to change his name “because I didn’t want anybody to know it was me playing. Because I was ashamed. So Harry says why don’t you just shorten your name to Marty Robbins, and nobody will know it. And, he said, it will make a nice name, too. I had dreams of becoming a singer and being on record, and I thought Marty Robbins would look better than Martin David Robinson on a record.” (more…)