Part one of the three-part Biographical Conversations with James G. Martin, journeys from the future governor’s childhood in South Carolina to his first election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972.

Born in Savannah in 1935, James Grubbs Martin grew up in Winnsboro, South Carolina, a small town where all the neighbors, Governor Martin says, "had spanking privileges." In truth, the future governor and his three brothers got most of the discipline they needed at home. Martin’s mother, Mary, was a homemaker with strict standards that all four Martin brothers were expected to uphold. Her husband, Arthur Morrison Martin, a progressive Presbyterian minister who preached racial equality in the heart of the Jim Crow south, instilled in all of his sons a profound sense of social justice.

As a high school student at Winnsboro's Mount Zion institute, Martin was a bit of a renaissance pupil; a standout on the school basketball and football teams, the future governor also played the tuba, and--perhaps most important--developed a life-long love for chemistry. "It was a mysterious thing, "the governor says of the science, "You could see the liquids. You could see the solids, the crystals, the powders, the colors. And yet the secret of chemistry is not what you can see, but at the molecular and atomic level that you can’t see."

After graduating from Mount Zion in 1953, Martin went to Davidson College, where he majored in chemistry. Home for a weekend during his sophomore year, Martin met a Dorothy Ann McCauley, and by the end of the summer, the two had become close friends. That Fall, Dottie McAulay enrolled at Queens College in nearby Charlotte; two years later, right after Jim Martin graduated from Davidson in the Spring of 1957, the couple married.

Shortly after the wedding, the Martins moved to New Jersey, where the future governor pursued a doctoral degree at Princeton. At Princeton the couple welcomed their first child, James Grubbs Martin Jr., in December 1959. The following year, PhD in hand, Martin accepted a job as a chemistry professor at his alma mater, and the family moved back to Davidson. It was during these professorial years that Martin first became interested in politics. In 1961, Martin registered as a Republican, not as a reflection of a specific philosophical view, but because "The Democratic Party had held sway, had been totally dominant for a century or more." Martin believed that "the south had been held back by being totally controlled and dominated by one party. And I thought that there was a need to inject some degree of competition, though I had no idea that I’d ever be a part of helping to make that come about. I was just going to register with the Republicans in the interest of two-party politics."

But in fact, Martin would play a key-role in turning North Carolina into a two-party state. Although he lost his first bid for election when he vied for a city council post in 1963, three years later he won the post of county commissioner, and his political career was up and running. By this time a new member had joined the Martin family; Emily Wood Martin was born in June 1962. Ten years later, in February 1972, the Martin’s third child, Arthur Benson Martin, was born.