Richard Edgar Martz ’57

Richard Edgar Martz ’57 died in Burnsville, North Carolina, on April 10, 2008, of lung cancer. A multi-talented man who marched to tunes nobody else heard, Dick left Dartmouth in his junior year and never got a degree. Nonetheless, he became a lifelong problem-solver, an inventor of high-tech components for the Apollo program and director of operations for the Dartmouth Medical School. At 15, as a high school sophomore in Michigan, he won an experimental Ford Foundation scholarship and went to Yale. After acing the subjects that interested him and flunking everything else, he was sent home to finish high school and went on to Dartmouth, where his brother Bud was a senior. At Dartmouth joined Delta Kappa Epsilon, but dropped out in 1956. After working as a surveyor he returned to Hanover, gained a job in the physics department and taught himself computer programming. That led him to W.L. Gore & Associates, then a producer of specialized wiring for military planes and spacecraft. Dick used his wife’s kitchen stove to invent an insulation technique used in the Apollo spacecraft. Returning to Hanover, he ran computer services and became director of operations at the Medical School before leaving in 1986. Dick was an avid hiker and bluegrass banjo player. He is survived by his wife, Aletta; his first wife, Lee; daughters Wendy and Dianne; siblings Bud and Ellen; and two grandchildren.