Gender

Male

Location

Temple Terrace, FL

Birthday:

September 8

Age:

60

Graduating Year:

1982

About Me:

Greetings fellow Terriers! I graduated from HHS in 1982. That year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average teetered below 1,000, and Bertie Higgins and Tommy Tutone performed at Grad Nite. Coincidence? I think not! I'm a second generation Terrier, following in the footsteps of my parents, Tommy Martin and Sarah Jean Strange Martin, both from the Class of 1952. My wife of 20 years, Mary Angelo ('83) and I have two daughters, Sarah and Julia. Since 1995, I have worked as a journalist for the St. Petersburg Times. Currently, I'm the Senior News Researcher there, based in the Times' downtown Tampa bureau. I love my job, which is an amalgam of investigative journalism, research librarianship, database creation, GIS, and other jack-of-all-trades newsroom technology tasks. At HHS, I played soccer (badly), though I did score a goal once in a game against Brandon, thanks to a sweet assist on an indirect free kick from Steve Shaw. (Thanks, Steve.) After my junior year, I represented HHS at American Legion Boys State in Tallahassee. I had a front-row seat for the Steel Cage Death Match that is our state's legislative process. Boys State convinced me I was not cut out for political life. More importantly, however, it afforded me the chance to shop at some of Tallahassee's really fine used record stores... I'm pretty sure I was one of the charter members of the UFAA, a purely silly organization formed at HHS for purely pointless reasons, though the yearbook photo caused the school's administration considerable paranoia and consternation, from which the quote atop my page is gleaned. Nothing scares like satire in the hands of adolescents, I guess. Had Homeland Security been around in 1982, I'm sure they would've been called in to straighten things out. After HHS, I attended the University of Tampa, where I graduated in 1986. I then moved to Gainesville, where I studied counseling psychology and journalism at UF. I worked for the Alachua County Library District, and eventually got my masters degree in Library and Information Science from USF in 1993, when I moved back to Tampa. I would be remiss in recalling my days at HHS if I didn't take a moment to single out some of the truly exceptional teachers who opened my mind and my eyes while I was there: teachers like Mr. Spearman, Mr. Garcia, Mrs. McAuliffe, Mr. Zale, Mrs. Cook, Mr. Santo and Mr. Bowen, among others.