Marian Martin, who died Oct. 3 in Denver at age 78, traveled in elite political and social circles where her admirers marveled at the elegant clothing she sewed, envying the designs that frequently outshone their own expensive couture investments.
She was born and raised in Chicago and possessed the tall, lean physique of a natural model. She attended the University of Colorado, where she established enduring friendships with her sorority sisters and met her first husband.
During her marriage to Richard Theodore Eckles, she spent 15 years in the San Luis Valley, where they maintained a cattle ranch and a tire store, and energetically worked for the state Republican Party.
When then-Gov. John Love put Eckles in charge of the state Department of Natural Resources, they moved to Denver. They later divorced, and she married lawyer B.T. Martin.
Marian Martin thrived in Denver. She kept an organized, dedicated sewing room in the Martins’ Cherry Hills home and knew which fabric stores offered the most expansive arrays of material. She became a familiar face at D’Leas, a Cherry Creek shop that specialized in buttons, elegant sewing patterns and bolts of resplendent fabrics.
When her husband traveled to New York City, she always bought fabric. Friends and family knew that when she traveled abroad, Martin invariably brought home swaths of exotic cloth along with other souvenirs.
“She always looked like she stepped out of Vogue magazine,” said her daughter, Cynthia Eckles Goodman of Overland Park, Kan. “Her clothes really were gorgeous. She made, for example, a little black velvet evening jacket with the most outrageous lining, all hand-done.”
Marian Martin sewed her daughters’ and sons’ school clothes, along with her daughters’ prom dresses and debutante dresses. She threw herself into making the girls’ clothing because they took a more liberal view of color and style than did their brothers.
The effect, her daughters said, was a far cry from the “loving hands at home” look despised by chic teenagers.
“All of my friends were like, ‘Where did you get that?”‘ recalled Goodman.
Her senior-prom dress, in an eye-catching lime green with a flowered chiffon overskirt and a matching lime-green cropped jacket, still hangs in her closet.
“There was no stigma about it,” she said. “They’d say, ‘I wish your mother would make something for me.”‘
Martin never lost her affection for elegant clothing. Throughout her 17-year struggle with cancer, Martin kept an impeccable appearance, even during appointments for chemotherapy, radiation therapy and dialysis.
“One of her nurses told me, ‘Your mother, every day, looked like a million dollars,”‘ Goodman said.
In addition to Goodman, she is survived by another daughter, Melany Eckles Abbott of Grand Junction; sons Dan Eckles of Fort Collins and Ted Eckles of Shaker Heights, Ohio; six grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
