Hailed as the guru of good taste and queen of domesticity, Martha Stewart has with a near-obsessive drive to succeed turned her life-long skills in catering, gardening and home decoration into a multi-million dollar industry. Born Martha Kostyra in Jersey City, New Jersey, Stewart was raised in a typical Polish-Catholic middle class home—her father was a pharmaceutical salesman and her mother was a sixth-grade school teacher. She has credited her father as the one who taught her all she knew about carpentry, gardening and public speaking, even if it came with the threat of a beating. While
