Martha Stewart's image as the personification of gracious living may lead some to imagine that she grew up in the sort of rural luxury pictured in her books and magazines. In fact, she was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, a location known more for heavy industry than for rustic charm. Her parents, Martha and Edward Kostyra, were a schoolteacher and a pharmaceuticals salesman, respectively. When Martha was three, the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey, where she grew up with four brothers and sisters in a close-knit Polish-American family defined by her father's intense ambition for his children. Edward Kostyra taught his daughter gardening when she was only three; her mother taught her cooking and sewing; her grandparents taught her to put up preserves, and she learned to make pies and cakes from a pair of retired bakers who lived next door.