Martha Layne Collins is an American former businesswoman and politician from Kentucky. She was elected as the state’s 56th governor from 1983 to 1987, the first woman to hold the office and the only one to date. Prior to that, she served as the 48th Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, under Governor John Y Brown, Jr. Collins was considered as a possible running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election.
About Martha Layne Collins in brief
Martha Layne Collins is an American former businesswoman and politician from Kentucky. She was elected as the state’s 56th governor from 1983 to 1987, the first woman to hold the office and the only one to date. Prior to that, she served as the 48th Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, under Governor John Y. Brown, Jr. Collins was considered as a possible running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election, but Mondale chose Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro instead. From 1998 to 2012, Collins served as an executive scholar-in-residence at Georgetown College. The 1993 conviction of Collins’s husband, Dr. Bill Collins, in an influence-peddling scandal, damaged her hopes for a return to political life. Her husband was convicted in a separate scandal in 1998 of influencing the U.S. Senate in exchange for a $100,000 contract to build a new school in Louisville, Kentucky. Collins taught at several universities after her four-year term as governor, and was the president of Saint Catharine College near Springfield, Kentucky from 1990 to 1996. She is the mother of Steve and Marla Collins, both of whom have served in the Kentucky House of Representatives and the Kentucky State Senate. She has been married to Billy Collins for more than 50 years, and they have two children, Steve and Steve Collins, and a daughter, Marla Marie Collins, who has served as a U. S. District Court judge in Kentucky since 2007. She also has a son, Billy Louis Collins, Jr., who served as Kentucky’s lieutenant governor from 1979 to 1987.
Collins is a member of the Kentucky Democratic Party and served as secretary of the state Democratic Party from 1975 to 1979. She worked on both Wendell Ford’s gubernatorial campaign in 1971 and Walter \”Dee\” Huddleston’s U. s. Senate campaign in 1972. She won the title of Kentucky Derby Festival Queen in 1954 and was a good student and a cheerleader. After high school, Hall enrolled at Lindenwood College, then an all-woman college in Saint Charles, Missouri, and earned a Bachelor of Home Economics degree in 1959. In 1966, she moved to Versailles, Kentucky, where she taught at Woodford County Junior High School. She married Billy Collins shortly after her graduation and the couple became active in several civic organizations, including the Jaycees and the Young Couples Club. In 1957, Hall met Billy Collins while attending a Baptist camp in Shelby County. She and Collins dated while he was finishing a degree in dentistry. In 1959, the couple moved to Georgetown, Kentucky; he was a student in Georgetown College, about 13 miles from Lexington; he and Hall dated while finishing their degrees in Home Economics. She became interested in politics, and worked on several Democratic campaigns. In 1975, she was elected clerk of theKentucky Court of Appeals. In 1979, Collins was elected lieutenant governor in 1979, underGovernor John Y Brown,. Jr. She successfully used economic incentives to bring a Toyota manufacturing plant to Georgetown.
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