Vernon Richard Martin was born in Waucoma, Iowa, in 1893. He began his career as a banker in Oelwein and Kellogg, Iowa. In the early 1920s he was a state bank examiner and the deputy superintendent of banking in Iowa. Martin went to work for the Maytag Company in 1924 as a salesman. He went on to serve as regional and divisional manager in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Kentucky. During World War II, Martin served as the director of labor procurement in Newton, Iowa. Following the war he worked as the assistant branch manager of Maytag's Kansas City branch, returning to Newton in 1944 as general sales manager in charge of the Maytag Company's national sales organization. He retired from this position in 1954. After his retirement he gave lectures and seminars about sales and public relations. In addition to all of this he was engaged in dairy farming in the Newton area. Martin was active in Republican Party politics and was chairman of the state Republican Party from 1959 to 1961. He was an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. He was also active in the Masonic Lodge, the Newton Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, and was a past president of the Sales Executives Club of Central Iowa. Vernon R. Martin died in 1973, at the age of eighty.