Early Life
Martin was born to Joan (who was known as "Jenny" both to her family and friends, according to Martin) and Alfred Manuel Martin, Sr. in Berkeley, California. He was of Portuguese and Italian descent, as his father was a native of the Azores and his mother was born to a large Italian family in California. Joan Martin always referred to Alfred, her second husband (she had been married before to a native Italian named Donato Pisani, whom her family arranged her to marry, and later married a singer named Jack Downey and took his name; the marriage lasted until Jack's death many years later), as the "jackass" because he abandoned the family. As Martin grew up in West Berkeley his mother took careful notice not to let her son know his actual name, not wanting him to know he shared the same name with Alfred Martin. He began being called "Billy" after his grandmother (Joan's mother) started calling him "Bello" (Italian masculine for "beautiful"; Martin said in his autobiography Number One that she would also call him "Bellitz,", a dialectical version of the same word). In fact, such careful care had been taken to hide Martin's birthname from him that he didn't find out until entering school; on his first day, while the teacher took attendance, his teacher called on "Alfred Martin" and young Billy thought she had skipped over him.
Read more about this topic: Billy Martin
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