by Paul McLane, Editor

This commentary was originally published in Radio World newspaper on April 11, 2001. Reprinted with the kind permission of Paul McLane and Radio World.

Let’s hear a big Texas-sized cheer for George Marti.

The radio equipment legend was honored this winter at a meeting of the Cleburne Rotary Club. The Texas Association of Broadcasters presented Marti with a replica of its commemorative plaque about his career, which is on permanent display at TAB headquarters in Austin; and the mayor of Cleburne declared “George Marti Day.” .

It’s fitting. I’m sure there are other notable people who live in Cleburne. But for most of us in the radio business, the town name means just one thing: Marti.

According to the TABulletin, broadcasters from around the state made the trip to Cleburne to show appreciation for everything Marti has done for the industry. Among them: TAB President Ray Alexander; John Barger; Richard Tuck; Benny Springer; Dudley Waller; Dan Bell; Norman Philips; Gary Moss; John Furr; David Webb; Donna Burt; and Ann Arnold, the TAB executive director.

Jim Godfrey of Marti Electronics and Steve Schott of Harris Corp. were among those representing the technology side.

To this day, eight decades after his birth and five years after selling the company that bears his name, George Marti is synonymous with radio remotes. He revolutionized such broadcasts for radio in the 1940s, designing and building portable microwave transmitters to replace costly, unreliable phone circuits.

As the TABulletin tells the tale, and as we’ve reported in the pages of RW in the past, Marti attended tech school in Fort Worth and began his career as a part-time apprentice for what is now the Texas State Networks. Marti served as a Marine staff sergeant in World War II; after discharge he applied for a license for KCLE in Cleburne. He designed and built his own 250-watt transmitter and audio console in his mother’s living room.

KCLE went on the air on April 7, 1947. But like every station owner, he was sensitive to costs, and he decided it was too expensive to have an engineer sitting at the transmitter just to record readings every 30 minutes. So he built one of the first transmitter remote control systems, allowing readings to be logged from the studio.

Broadcast colleagues began asking Marti to build equipment. In 1960 he founded Marti Electronics and signed a contract with Collins Radio to market the equipment.

In the late 1970s, Marti began to market his products internationally, including studio-transmitter links. He sold the company in 1996 to Broadcast Electronics but continued his interests in radio stations throughout the state.

In 1991, Marti received the TAB’s Pioneer of the Year Award and the NAB Radio Engineering Achievement Award.

Today, with the power of ISDN and POTS codecs at our fingertips, it’s easy to forget how important Marti’s reliable, affordable RPU technology must have been to radio stations when it first became available. Certainly, the phone industry took decades to catch up.

Oh, by the way: George Marti also served six terms as mayor of Cleburne. And his Marti Foundation awards $200,000 annually in college scholarships to the youth of Johnson County. So it seems Marti stands not just for RPU, but for class, as well.

Well done, Mr. Marti, well done indeed.