Raymond L. Martinez

The son of Mexican-American serviceman Ramon Martinez and German war widow Ursula Ackerman, Raymond was born amid the ruins of post-war West Germany. His father moved them around Europe and eventually to central Missouri in the 1950's. Raymond spent his youth between there and Germany, working on cars and eventually becoming a race car driver and sharing the track with Rusty Wallace on at least one occasion. After the heightening of the Vietnam war following the 1968 Tet Offensive, he was drafted and served in the United States Air Force in Vietnam as well as on Guam during the conflict. His main role in the Air Force was in munitions, specializing in assembling bombs and rockets. He later met his future wife Kathi in North Dakota and the two of them went on to raise a family while moving around to various bases around the world. Martinez retired as a Chief Master Sergeant from the Air Force in 1990 and moved his family to Fairbanks, Alaska where he worked for the University of Alaska under contract for NASA building test rockets for the Aurora Borealis and managing Poker Flat Research Range. He has been interviewed and featured as an expert on several rocketry-related educational TV programs that filmed in Alaska including Newton's Apple (1983), Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993), and Mystery Hunters (2002), often identifiable only as the finger that pushes the launch button. He helped his son Michael A. Martinez with special effects and weapons wrangling on several small budget film productions and, in 2009, retired to New Mexico, to live out his years just a few miles away from his daughters and half-brother.