Page 30 - Delaware Lawyer - Spring 2022

FEATURE
Joshua W. Martin III
David B. Brown
Of Counsel:
28 DELAWARE LAWYER SPRING 2022
When you shine shoes for money, you learn a few things: hard work and care win tips. A black and white shoe requires particular attention to detail. And if soldiers from a military base bring in their combat boots, your productivity will slump. These were valuable lessons absorbed and later generalized to life by Joshua W. Martin III as a 15-year-old shining shoes for the summer at his father’s barber shop in Columbia, South Carolina, where Josh was born in 1944. Excuse the soldiers from Fort Jackson if they failed to predict that the teen giving their boots a shine, mirror-like though it surely was, would forge one of the most diverse and impressive professional careers in the history of Delaware, if not the nation.
The list of Josh’s achievements is formidable, and as broad as it is long. It began in his early teenage years, when he mastered four musical instruments — piano, organ, clarinet and saxophone — making all-state band a record four years in a row and substituting as a church organist. He placed second in two Fisher Body automobile design competitions, and collected awards in public speaking competitions and in the state science
fair for a complex physics project designed to detect atomic particles. He was awarded scholarships to National Science Foundation summer programs at distant universities, but still found time to play on his high school’s tennis team while achieving the highest grades in his large high school class. All before he turned 19.
Josh credits his parents for his strong work ethic and his keen interest Continued on page 26