The curator of a 1986 exhibit called "Jackie Martin, The Washington Years" wrote that after convincing the administration to allow it she became the first girl in her elementary school to take an industrial arts class.

[2] Lacking money to pay room, board, and other essentials that were not covered by the scholarship, she spent a year working in a sequence of retail jobs, including one as editor of a department store magazine.

In the fall of 1922 Martin enrolled in Syracuse University and during her freshman year she earned letters in basketball, track, and rifle shooting.

Although she took jobs on campus and set up a laundry pick-up service, she was unable to earn enough money to continue beyond the first year.

"[11][5][note 4] At this time she was also manager and coach of a women's professional basketball team, the Arcadians, which played its home games at the arena.

At that time she directed a staff of about a dozen men responsible for covering straight news, society, fashions, theaters, and sports in two or more pages of photos each day.

One author says that in the 1930s Martin was often credited with "almost single-handedly transforming William Randolph Hearst's tired Herald into what was to become Cissy Patterson's sleek, eye-catching Times-Herald.

"[17] In 1936 Martin and Patterson visited a rural section of Tennessee and North Carolina to produce a series of six articles called "Dixie's Dead End.

In August 1940 Martin left the Times-Herald to begin a career as freelance photographer, publicist, war correspondent, lecturer, and magazine editor.

At the beginning of that period she spent two seasons crossing the country as a paid lecturer as well as managing an advertising campaign for the Chrysler Corporation.

[5] In the winter months of 1941 and spring of 1942 she set up a photo department for the Washington bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times and began work as associate editor of the Woman's Home Companion.

[5] In 1944 she obtained a contract from the Macmillan publishing company (of New York) for a book about nurses in the U.S. Army and was sent to Italy as war correspondent for Ladies' Home Journal.

Given the opportunity to witness the invasion of southern France, she broke the Macmillan contract and accompanied the 7th Army in its liberation of Marseilles, Lyon, and Toulon.

[1]: 11 During the war years Martin contributed freelance photos and features to widely-circulated U.S. magazines, including Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Look.

[5][23][note 9] After 1952 Martin did little or no freelance work as she was by then stationed in Europe as a full-time employee of the United States Foreign Service.

In 1925, when first learning her craft at the Underwood photo service, she used a 5x7 Graflex camera using glass plates rather than roll film as recording media.

[28] Between July and December 1942 she served in uniform as photographer and assistant public relations officer to the newly formed Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.

[5] Her major achievement during the six years she served in that position was the organization of an international traveling exhibition of photographs called Family of Man that had been assembled by Edward Steichen and premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.

[5][note 11] After returning from Paris in 1956 Martin spent ten years in freelance photojournalism while also working at her brother's motion picture studio.

Martin's few months as WAAC photographer and publicist resulted in a book authored by Jean Stansbury called Bars on Her Shoulders (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1943).

In reviewing this book, a critic for the Washington Post wrote: "Miss Martin focuses on the usual beauties of the city—its parks, fountains, formal gardens, sweeping vistas—with one notable exception.

As a first year student she joined the Delta Gamma sorority at Syracuse University and retained her membership through the rest of her life.

[40][note 14] Six years later she became an associate member of Theta Sigma Phi, a national professional and honorary fraternity for women in journalism.

[45] In 1960 she became the company's vice president, and, according to one account, helped to make the firm the largest producer of documentary films south of New York.

[1]: 12 In 1923 Martin became the first-ever woman sports editor at a major metropolitan daily paper when she took over that job at the Washington Times.

[5][29] Later that year she achieved a long time goal in becoming the first woman member of the White House News Photographers Association.

[1]: 4 [52] Emma Martin was a Christian Scientist who was chaplain for the Columbia Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and sometime president of the Capitol Hill History Club.

While the setting might be the Delta Gamma sorority house near the Syracuse University campus, the Lindberg baby trial, the Matta Grosso in Brazil, or the Seventh Army's campaign through France, the story is the same.

[1]: 15–16  The curator adds that despite a decline in health that began during her wartime experiences, she continued to project youth and vigor even as she aged.