One life with cars. One collection for everyone.

When Mel Martin was seventeen, his great-uncle gave him a Douglas truck. It wasn't fast and it wasn't pretty, but it ran, and that was enough. A machine you could open up, understand, and put back together taught a lesson no classroom offered. He had moved to Arizona at sixteen; within a year, the truck had decided what the rest of his life would look like.

The first shop was a repair garage and gas station in Mayer, Arizona, opened at seventeen. Phoenix came next: another garage, then a towing operation, then twenty-five years in the auction business. He fixed cars, hauled them, valued them. Decades of that daily, hands-on work became something else along the way: a collection. Cars that represented significant periods in automotive history kept finding him, and he kept them.

By 2005 the collection had outgrown private life, and Martin Auto Museum was founded "out of a need to share." His words, and still the mission. The doors opened to the public in 2008. By 2017 there were more vehicles in storage than on the floor, and in March 2022 the museum moved into its current home at 43rd Avenue and Thunderbird Road in Glendale: more than 200 vehicles including classics, hot rods, customs and imports, plus antique gas pumps, neon and signage, a carousel tucked between the cars for the kids, and a volunteer crew whose automotive knowledge runs as deep as the collection.