Salvatore Joseph DeMarco

Salvatore Joseph (Joe) DeMarco 30 year retiree, technical artist and World War I airplane enthusiast died Friday, January 27, 2012 at The Gilchrist Hospice in Towson.

Mr. DeMarco was born and raised in Baltimore City. In 1954 after spending evenings and weekends for most of three years building a house in Fork, Baltimore County, he remained in the County for the next 58 years until his death.

Mr. DeMarco had a very fulfilling life, so much so that he had a request that upon his death, at his funeral he wanted the song, My Cup Runneth Over, to be played at his funeral.

Mr. DeMarco was born in 1918, shortly after the first flights by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. He has said that at a very young age he saw his first airplane, a Curtiss Jenny. A year later he recalls seeing his first airplane in flight. It was in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh made his trans-Atlantic flight that his fascination with planes took hold. That in combination with his artistic talents lead to what would become his life's passion, drawing and painting aircraft, and most notably, World War I era airplanes.

At an early age (by about 25) Mr. DeMarco had seen the Hindenburg and Graf Zepplin, flown in a Ford Tri-motor piloted by Clarence Chamberlin and seen Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Erhart in person. He also had seen Bob Hope on stage at the Hippodrome, had traveled to Los Angeles and Montreal, Canada on gravel roads in a touring car and heard the original broadcast of "War of the Worlds" by Orson Wells.

Mr. DeMarco's career began in 1942 as a draftsman at the Glenn L. Martin Company. While working at Martins he took a home-study course in mechanical engineering. At work he began sketching some of the parts he was drafing, this lead to expanded duties as the sketches aided the design engineers in their work. It wasn't long before he headed up a group creating the artwork to assist the engineers.

On October 12, 1946 he married Edith DeMarco (nee Taylor) whom he met a year earlier to the day. They met at Martin's where she was a secretary. They celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary on October 12, 2011.

In January 1951 Joe was offered a job at a newly formed company called Aircraft Armaments, Inc., now AAI Corporation. A few former Glenn L. Martin engineers started this company in 1950. These men recognized Mr. DeMarco's talents and sought him out. He was the 15th employee hired at AAI, this was in 1951. As it turned out Mr. DeMarco took off on his second day of work at his new employer for the birth of the first of his two sons, Michael. A second son, Bob followed in 1952.

Mr. DeMarco retired from AAI 31 years later as Manager of Arts Services. During that time AAI had grown to 3,500 employees.

During Mr. DeMarco's free time he liked to sketch and doodle airplanes. During 1966 had three pencil renderings of World War I airplanes and was planning a fourth. At the urging of a coworker his drawings were displayed at an Antique Gun Show and the first request for a copy of the drawings was made. This first request led to the fourth drawing being completed and the first printing of the drawings to run off the press. This was the first set of airplane drawings of the many to follow over the years.

Mr. DeMarco's meticulous research for accuracy and detail in his drawings led him to The National Air and Space Museum, part of The Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. There he ran into Mr. Louis Casey, a member of the purchasing department for the museum gift shop. After seeing Mr DeMarco's work, Mr. Casey pronounced his work 'imprimatur' and asked to see other sample prints. Before long copies of Mr. DeMarco's drawings were on sale in to The National Air and Space Museum.
Having gotten his prints into the National Air and Space Museum Gift Shop, he began to look around for other outlets. Eventually his prints became available at The Air Force Museum at Dayton, Ohio; The San Diego Air and Space Museum; Wheels and Wings in South Carolina; The Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; The Wright Brothers National Memorial Museum at Kitty Hawk; and The Old Rheinbeck Aerodrome and Museum in Rheinbeck, New York.

In 1968 Mr. DeMarco reflected that the airplanes he was drawing were state-of-the-art in 1918, and now, just fifty years later, the United States was on the verge of rocketing astronauts into space on the first mission to orbit the moon. He called an old acquaintance at the Baltimore Sunpapers, William Perkinson, Science Editor, for the Evening Sun. (he had worked with Mr. Perkinson in 1938, Mr. Perkinson was a copy boy in the news room, Mr. DeMarco a clerk in the library). Mr. DeMarco apprised him of his drawings, noting that the airplanes he was drawing were state-of-the-art in 1918, almost exactly fifty years prior to the imminent lunar shot. Mr. Perkinson sent a reporter to interview him, and on November 27, 1968 an illustrated article describing his artwork and success with the nascent aviation art print business appeared on the front page of the second section in the Evening Sun. As a result of the article Mr. DeMarco soon began to receive calls and letters requesting prints; first locally, then statewide, then out of state, and eventually from out of the country…as far away as Australia and Japan."

As the years passed he still received frequent requests for permission to use his artwork in non-commercial and educational ways and for promotional material for non-profit organizations.

During his life Mr. DeMarco created about thirty paintings. One painting was cover art for an American Aviation Historical Society quarterly journal, and another was for Cross and Cockade quarterly journal. Several were made as box-cover art for game companies such as Avalon Hill Game Co. in Baltimore, MD, Game Designers Workshop in Illinois, and an outfit in Connecticut. Micro Prose used his WWI drawings to illustrate the instruction manual for their WWI PC game, Knights of the Sky. Mr. DeMarco did other paintings, most as private commissions.

Mr. DeMarco's aviation legacy to the world now includes, not only his drawings and paintings, but a PC spreadsheet program based on a proven geometric projection system that he first conceived in 1943. He called it the ARTISTS' PERSPECTIVE MODELER (APM). It is not a drawing program in the same sense as 3D CAD programs that do the drawing for the artist. APM allows the artist full control, thus keeping him/her 'in the loop' and affording the pride and pleasure of well-done hands-on drawing – painlessly. It is particularly suited to the needs of aviation artists, but it can be used in any art genre that requires accurate perspective drawings.

Finally getting an end product to a concept first developed in 1943 was possible because of the invention and perfection of the hand-held calculators and then the personal computer. When Mr. DeMarco developed the mathematics for this system in about 1960 it took him a half-hour just to plot one point. The programmable calculator reduced that time to 8 seconds, and now with the computer that same point can be plotted almost instantaneously. As Mr. DeMarco once told this writer, "But remember, I had to stop in the early years and teach myself trigonometry for the program and then build the math formulae that I later used in the program."

Condensed and edited from a biography by Donna J. Suwall, 2002