Otis R. Marston

Otis R. "Dock" Marston (born February 11, 1894, in Berkeley, California - died August 30, 1979, in San Francisco) was an early Grand Canyon river runner who participated in a large number of river running "Firsts." Marston was the eighty-third person to complete the water transit of the Grand Canyon. He spent the last thirty years of his life writing his magnum opus on the history of the first 100 Grand Canyon river runners. In researching material for his book, he amassed a vast collection of material on early Grand Canyon river runners, with additional information on early Green and Colorado river runners. His collection is housed in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Otis Reed Marston's father, Captain William Harrington Marston, was orphaned in northern Maine at the age of nine. William went to sea out of Boston in his teens where he became a master mariner and eventually owned a large shipping business sailing the Pacific out of San Francisco, California.

The forty-eight-year-old Captain met twenty-one-year-old Idela Alice Reed while sailing one of his ships from Hawaii to California in 1883. The couple was married the next year. Idela gave birth to her first child, Sibyl, in 1885, followed by her first son, Ellery William, in 1886. Tragically, Ellery choked to death while the family was at sea in late 1888 and he was buried there. Idela gave birth to four more children, Elsa, Merle, Vera and another son, Otis Reed.

Young Otis was a strong swimmer, and he swam across the Golden Gate from San Francisco to Marin County in 1915. He received his bachelors in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1916, then went on to receive his masters in industrial engineering at Cornell University in 1917.

Otis joined the United States Naval Academy where he graduated as an ensign in 1918. While on leave on Christmas Eve, 1918, Otis rode a mule to Hermit Camp in the Grand Canyon, and saw Hermit Rapid on Christmas Day. By the close of 1919, he had completed his qualifications as a submarine commander with the United States Navy on the H-4 submarine.

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