Young Jim Mar's father made him attend Chinese classes every day after school and Saturday mornings. "Like many children of immigrants," Mar says, "I resented it."
The best part about Chinese school was recess, he says, when he dashed around the corner to a Jewish deli and bought a headcheese sandwich for 10 cents.
For all the time he spent there, Chinese school didn't take. "I regret that now," he says. "If I'd learned Chinese, I would have gone to China more."
Jim was born in 1920 in Oakland, Calif., the eldest of five children. His mother, Mabel Chinn, was also born in California. His father, Mar Woh, was born near Canton, China.
When Jim was 2 years old, the family moved to Seattle, where Mar Woh eventually owned a supermarket (not specifically Chinese) at 14th & Yesler as well as two Chinese restaurants.
Jim's mother died a few months after giving birth to her third child, of protracted complications from that birth. Jim was only 6 years old. Eventually his father re-married and had two more children with his second wife.
Jim attended Garfield High School. He had white friends there, but he never socialized with them outside of school. Some of his relatives called white people "white devils," so he kept his open-mindedness to himself.
"My life centered around the Chinese Baptist Church," he says. The church was a Baptist mission, one of many ethnically distinct churches supported by the Baptists. The Sunday school teachers were white, and their volunteer assistants were Chinese.
When he was 16, Jim met the daughter of a Sunday school assistant. Also 16, the girl's name was Edith Lew.
That summer, Jim worked in a cannery in Port Althorp, Alaska. He tended a machine that shaped flat pieces of tin into cans, at a rate of 116 per minute. He became so adept at his job that he could tend the machine and read a book at the same time. Jim checked out books-usually detective novels by Agatha Christie or Erle Stanley Garner-from the cannery library.
Most workers at the cannery were Chinese or Filipino. They lived in bunkhouses and ate at large round tables with heavy chains suspended above them. "The cooks brought out big bowls of rice and hung them from the chains," says Jim. The workers ate rice and salmon three times a day. Jim hasn't liked salmon since.
He graduated from Garfield in 1937. "My father thought there was no future for Chinese-Americans," says Jim, "and sailed us all back to China." While they were at sea, in July of that year, war between China and Japan broke out. Shortly after their arrival in Canton, the Japanese bombed the city. The Mars turned around and sailed back to Seattle, arriving a day before classes started at the University of Washington. Jim enrolled immediately after disembarking. He rode a streetcar up 23rd Avenue to school.
"My father wanted me to be a doctor, but I couldn't stand the sight of blood," Jim says. He studied engineering instead, and found he liked it-so much so that he secretly applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
When he failed to hear back back from MIT, Jim enrolled again at UW for his sophomore year. Then, early on the morning of Sept. 19, 1938, he at last received a telegram of acceptance from MIT. He excitedly woke his father to tell him the news, and his father groggily approved. "If he'd been fully awake he might have said no," Jim says.
He left that very night.
He traveled by train as far as Chicago until a hurricane hit the northeast, damaging railroads around Boston. He flew the rest of the way. It was the first time he had ever been on an airplane, a harbinger of his career.
Lucky strikes
Jim's relationship with Edith had become "a bit romantic," he says shyly. The two corresponded while he was at MIT. Edith, a violinist, studied music at UW.
Jim's own musical education was limited to Rossini's "William Tell Overture" and what he had heard on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade on the radio in high school. But his MIT roommate, a trumpeter, took Jim to concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, at a cost of $25 a season, instilling in him a lifelong love of classical music.
Both Jim and Edith graduated from college in 1941. Edith went on to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and Jim got his first engineering job at Curtiss-Wright Airplane Company in Buffalo. Geographically closer, their romance blossomed, and they were married on Feb. 28, 1942.
Because his job was war-related, Jim was granted a deferment from service in World War II. In 1944, he relinquished that deferment and joined the Navy. As a seaman first class, he attended radar schools in Monterey, Calif., and Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.
But the war ended before he could put his knowledge of radar to use, and he returned to MIT to attend graduate school. By this time he and Edith had started a family: daughter Karen was born in 1944, followed by son Chris (born 1948), daughter Cori (born 1955) and son Tim (born 1957). Karen died of cancer in 1978.
Jim earned his doctorate in civil engineering in 1949, and became a researcher in the aeronautics department at MIT. In the spring of 1950, a professor in the department fell ill and Jim was asked to replace him. He ended up teaching at MIT for 41 years. He taught aerodynamics, aerospace engineering and structures, the study of an airplane's frame and body.
When Jim first returned to MIT, the family lived in Lexington, a suburb of Cambridge. While there, they began to attend the Unitarian Church. Three years later they built a home in nearby Lincoln, inhabited mostly by well-educated people associated with MIT, Harvard or Tufts University. They were the first Chinese family to live there. "We were well received," Jim says. "There was no prejudice."
Winters were bitterly cold and snowy. Sometimes the Mar children built an igloo in their yard and played in it all winter long.
Cold Warrior
In the early years, "I was a warrior of the Cold War," Jim says. "We were motivated by our fear of Russia. The enemy we have now is not as well defined." He says he believes that, back then, the development of airplane and aerospace technology was more significant because changes were measured in larger percentages than they are now.
In addition to teaching, Jim also served as a consultant. By the early 1970s, he was chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force. He commuted to Washington, D.C. and participated in meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In 1986, with an empty nest, Edith tired of the harsh Massachusetts winters. She and Jim bought a house in Pacific Grove, Calif., where she moved right away. Jim stayed in an apartment in Cambridge, until he joined her in 1990, when he retired.
Jim has kept abreast of his field since retirement. He has provided technical oversight of aging aircraft for the Federal Aviation Administration, oversight of the solid rocket booster re-design for the Air Force after the Challenger disaster, and he has commented on the structure of Navy aircraft. He has also been a consultant to Boeing and lectured at UW, most recently in early January.
Back home
In the summer of 2005, Jim and Edith moved back to Seattle to be near their two young grandchildren, the children of Tim and his wife Eliza. (Their other two grandchildren, Chris' children, are now grown.) They live in an elegant new Queen Anne condominium. Spacious and immaculate, it is filled with Chinese art.
In days gone by, Jim's hobby was to play tennis and squash. Now it is to make movies of his grandchildren. "I have lots of toys for that," he says, referring to his camera and accessories.
"It's been my good fortune to come into contact with people much smarter than I," Jim says deferentially. "Otherwise my life would have been very dreary."
Good fortune is valued worldwide by the Chinese, and Jim is no exception.[[In-content Ad]]
