Mary Virginia Martin was an American actress and Broadway star. A muse of Rodgers and Hammerstein's, she originated many leading roles over her career including Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, she was named a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989. She was the mother of actor Larry Hagman. Martin was born in Texas, her life as a child, as she describes it in her autobiography My Heart Belongs, was secure and happy. She had close relationships with both of her parents as well as her siblings, her autobiography details how the young actress had an instinctive ear for recreating musical sounds. Martin's father, Preston Martin, was a lawyer, her mother, Juanita Presley, was a violin teacher. Although the doctors told Juanita that she would risk her life if she attempted to have another baby, she was determined to have a boy. Instead, she had Mary. Martin's family had a orchard that kept her entertained, she played with her elder sister Geraldine, riding ponies. Martin adored her father.

"He was good-looking, silver-haired, with the kindest brown eyes. Mother was the disciplinarian, but it was Daddy who could turn me into an angel with just one look." Martin, who said "I’d never understand the law", began singing outside the courtroom where her father worked every Saturday night at a bandstand. She sang in a trio with Marion Swofford, dressed in bellhop uniforms. "Even in those days without microphones, my high piping voice carried all over the square. I have always thought that I inherited my carrying voice from my father." She remembered having a photographic memory as a child. School tests were not a problem, learning songs was easy, she got her first taste of singing solo at a fire hall, where she soaked up the crowd's appreciation. "Sometimes I think that I cheated my own family and my closest friends by giving to audiences so much of the love I might have kept for them. But that's the way. Martin's craft was developed by becoming a mimic, she would win prizes for looking and dancing like Ruby Keeler and singing like Bing Crosby.

"Never, never can I say I had a frustrating childhood. It was all joy. Mother used to say she never had seen such a happy child --. I don't remember that, but I do remember that I never wanted to go to bed, to go to sleep, for fear I'd miss something." During high school, Martin dated Benjamin Hagman before she left to attend finishing school at Ward–Belmont in Nashville, Tennessee. In Nashville she enjoyed imitating Fanny Brice at singing gigs, but she found school dull and felt confined by its strict rules, she was homesick for her family and Hagman. During a visit and Benjamin persuaded Mary's mother to allow them to marry, they did, by the age of 17, Martin was married, pregnant with her first child and forced to leave Ward–Belmont. She was, happy to begin her new life, but she soon learned that this life as she would say was nothing but "role playing", their honeymoon was at her parents' house, Martin's dream of life with a family and a white-picket fence faded. "I was 17, a married woman without real responsibilities, miserable about my mixed-up emotions, afraid there was something awfully wrong with me because I didn't enjoy being a wife.

Worst of all, I didn't have enough to do." It was "Sister", suggesting that she should teach dance. "Sister" taught Martin her first real dance—the waltz clog. Martin imitated her first dance move, she opened a dance studio. Here, she created her own moves, imitated the famous dancers she watched in the movies and taught "Sister's" waltz clog; as she recalled, "I was doing something I wanted to do—creating." Wanting to learn more moves, Martin went to California to attend the dance school at the Franchon and Marco School of the Theatre and opened her own dance studio in Mineral Wells, Texas. She was given a ballroom studio with the premise. There, she learned how to phrase blues songs. One day at work, she accidentally walked into the wrong room, they asked her in what key she would like to sing "So Red Rose". Having no idea what her key was, she sang regardless and got the job, she was hired to sing "So Red Rose" at the Fox Theater in San Francisco followed by the Paramount Theater in Los Angeles.

There would be one catch—she had to sing in the wings. She scored her first professional gig unaware. Soon after, Martin learned that her studio had been burnt down by a man who thought that dancing was a sin, she began to express her unhappiness. Her father gave her advice saying. Martin left everything behind including her young son and went to Hollywood while her father handled the divorce for her. In Hollywood, Martin plunged herself into auditions—so many that she became known as "Audition Mary", her first professional audition and job was on a national radio network. Among Martin's first auditions in Hollywood, she sang, "Indian Love Call". After her singing the song, "a tall, craggly man who looked like a mountain" told Martin that he thought she had something special, it was Oscar Hammerstein II. This marked the start of her career. Martin began her radio career in 1939 as the vocalist on a short-lived revival of The Tuesday Night Party on CBS. In 1940, she was a singer on NBC's Goo

The Jortin Forbes House is a single-family home located at 211 North Ann Arbor Street in Saline, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985; this house was built by Orange Risdon prior to 1856, as early as the 1840s. Although this house has been known as the Jortin Forbes House, there is no evidence that he lived there, in fact lived next door in the house at 209 North Ann Arbor. Jortin Forbes was active in village life, serving as street commissioner in 1866-67, inspector for the first Village election in 1866, Marshal in 1866-67, Justice of the Peace in 1878, his wife Matilda Forbes owned a milliner shop. Blacksmith Henry Johnson lived here in the 1860s, owners were Orrin Parsons, Sarah Schleh and Sarah Ennis; the Jortin Forbes House is Wing house. The structure sits on a small lot, it has a one-story wing to one side, both gabled. It has a wide frieze topped with a raking cornice without returns; the windows are in segmental-arched head openings. The front features a hipped roof front porch, with spindled balusters and decorative brackets, a addition.

A single-story addition on the rear of the house was built about 1881

Domenico Giovanni Giuseppe Maria Lanza was an Italian politician and the eighth Prime Minister from 1869 to 1873. Lanza was born in the Piedmontese city of Casale Monferrato, he studied medicine at Turin, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia returned to Casale where he divided his energies between practising medicine and developing his 33 hectare estate in nearby Roncaglia. He wrote on agriculture developments in both the practical and social aspects. Lanza was among the first in Monferrato to introduce modern equipment as iron ploughs and seed drills, involved himself in the agricultural education of poor children, hoping to achieve at once “the betterment of our agriculture and the moral and intellectual betterment of our agricultural workers.”Lanza was an active member of the Subalpine Agricultural Association of Turin and became its secretary. The association was concerned for reform in the political and economic spheres, as well as in that of agriculture, its identification with the cause of liberal nationalism—with the Risorgimento—was underlined at the September 1847 agrarian congress in Casale, when Lanza raised the cry of “Viva l’Italia libera ed indipendente!”

He commented on that event: “I did not join the association purely to improve the cultivation of cabbages.”, Lanza took an active part in the rising of 1848 and was elected to the Piedmontese parliament in that year. He attached himself to the party of Cavour and devoted his attention chiefly to questions of economy and finance, he became minister of public instruction in 1855 in the cabinet of Cavour, in 1858 minister of finance. Lanza followed Cavour into his temporary retirement in July 1859 after the Treaty of Villafranca, for a year was chairman of the House, he was minister of the interior in the La Marmora cabinet, arranged the transference of the capital to Florence. He maintained a resolute opposition to the financial policy of Menabrea, who resigned when Lanza was a second time elected, in 1869, chairman of the House. Lanza formed a new cabinet. With Quintino Sella as minister of finance he sought to reorganize Italian budget, resigned office when Sella's projects were rejected in 1873.

His cabinet had seen the accomplishment of Italian unity and the installation of an Italian government in Rome after the defeat of the Papal States in late 1870. Works by or about Giovanni Lanza at Internet Archive