Jobie Martin

In the library at Morrison Academic Advancement Center, where he substitute-teaches, Jobie Martin’s delivery is as graceful, his timing as sharp, his voice as mellifluous as when he was hosting James Brown, Joe Louis and Mahalia Jackson in the 1970s, back when he was the first African American in Mississippi to host a commercial TV program.

“Here I am, 84 years old and never been sick, still working every day. I was married for 40 years. When my wife died with breast cancer six years ago, I sold all my property and went to the senior citizen home. My children didn’t want me to go, but I said, ‘Now look, I’m almost 80, that’s where I’m supposed to be.’ I stayed up there three months, smelling that liniment and Ben-Gay, and one morning the office lady came by and said, ‘Mr. Martin, you know we lost two last night.’ This was a 12-story building, a big place, I was living on the 10th floor, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll help you find them.’ She said, ‘I mean they died, Mr. Martin.’ I called my daughter and said, Listen, send me a real estate agent over here quick,’ and I bought me a condominium and left out of that nursing home running.”

Mr. Martin played football for Jackson State when he was 35—older even than the head coach—and while he was running Jobie’s Fried Chicken Restaurant, in the waning days of his broadcasting career, he was also teaching special education at Westside Junior High. More recently, he’s had a scholarship named in his honor at Hinds Community College and picked up an L.T. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.

One Sunday in 1976 when I couldn’t wait to get my teen-boy paws on the new album by—argh—Hall & Oates, Mr. Martin was kind enough to unlock the door to his record shop on Delta Drive and let me in. So when he tells me today—all tongue-in-cheek-like—that during World War II, while working as a mail clerk (in-between singing in the Army band and serving as a military-hospital pathologist’s assistant), he ghost-wrote letters-from-home to read aloud to guys who weren’t getting their fair share of mail, I laugh, but not like you do at a joke.

“My mother named me Job,” Mr. Martin says. “She wanted me to have the patience of one of God’s special people who had so much hard luck.” He added the “ie” after his drill sergeant kept mispronouncing his name (you know, job with a little j). “But I’m ready to drop it now—to give my life to the Lord and try to be the man Job was. I wasn’t ready when my mom named me, but I think I’m ready now.”