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Of all places and times, he chose Fort Madison, Iowa and 1933 to be born. His father and mother were quite pleased.

They named him, Martin Francis King, but you can call him Marty.

Marty lived in downtown Fort Madison, but his cousins lived on a farm in the countryside, miles away but worlds apart. There, he liked to play all day.

He would go on grand adventures with them through woods and streams, imagining fantastical worlds and valiant battles. They would swim through small tributaries running into the Mississippi in their backyards and run through the trees like majestic warriors.

They were not quite old enough to understand the war, but they were old enough to see the strong kids leaving and the changed men coming back. Old enough to feel the pain.

Those adventures he’d take with his cousins were when he first saw the majesty that came with the outdoors. He saw how much it could heal people and he wanted to spend as much time in the magic of nature as possible.

His dad promised him that once he turned 13, he could go on a trip with him and get to see even more remarkable nature. Marty was so extremely excited to share such a huge interest with his father.

But, heartbreakingly, just before his 13th birthday, his dad suddenly passed away. Now it was only him, his mother, and his aunt. He’d never get to go on the special trip with his father.

When Marty grew up, he left home for boarding school and then St Louis University. Right out of school, he joined the Navy and went to Hawaii, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Now he understood why those dejected boys he saw coming home in his childhood did what they did. Sailing with the Navy brought him back to his younger days of trudging through creeks and crusading through woods.

In 1958, when he was on leave in Chicago waiting for another deployment, he met the love of his life, Julia Ann Rice. In 1960, the two were married.

In a decade or two, they had eleven rambunctious children whom they loved more than anything.

Marty had a love of water that was never matched. At one point, he was in every fly fishing organization in Missouri. No one else in the world could say that!

From a young age, the two of them made sure that their kids had the same love for the outdoors as Marty had when he was young. He wanted to spend as much time as possible with them outdoors unlike his father could do for him.

Now living on Northmoor Drive in St. Louis, there was a community of nature-loving families with other parents who wanted their kids to appreciate nature.

They started going on countless float trips together and creating lifelong bonds.

On these trips, Marty saw these rivers that he loved in horrible states. There was litter everywhere, huge tires in the mud, and no one seemed to care. Knowing that these fragile environments wouldn’t be able to handle that type of treatment, he decided he had to do something.

In 1988, the conference for the Rivers and Streams Committee of the Missouri Conservation Federation really started it all for Marty’s project. There, he met a whole room full of people who cared about solving all of the problems they saw on the water.

Another committee-member, Mark Van Patten, had been doing clean-up-trips on the Roubideaux (Roo-bee-doo) Creek. Marty saw this and inspiration struck! Could stream clean-ups become something bigger?

He wondered, “Why don’t we have Adopt-a-Highway for streams?” His idea was to gather groups of people-families, scout troops, schools-to work together and clean the streams!