People: Oct. 18, 1982

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Just nine days after the cab she was riding in was hit broadside by a van, Mary Martin, 68, with a plucky smile and the help of a walker, left San Francisco General Hospital. Though her longtime friend Actress Janet Gaynor remains in stable condition from the accident, Martin was adamant that the show go on—in this case, Over Easy, the PBS-TV program for older Americans that she co-hosts with Jim Hartz. With her two broken ribs and fractured pelvis on a slow mend, she taped her first postaccident show (which began airing last week). "I have to walk two blocks a day," says Martin. "Right now, though, I just can't lift my darned foot. I go up and down stairs backward."

Virtually waist deep in a field of 1,100 child violinists, cellists and pianists who were all taught by his learning-through-imitation method, Shinichi Suzuki waved his bow. Thousands of fingers tensed, and the second annual Chicagoland Suzuki Music Festival began on a note by Veracini (his Sonata in E Minor). Though hundreds of thousands of students have been taught by the Suzuki method since he introduced it more than three decades ago (including Rosalynn and Amy Carter, who took joint lessons in the White House), the 83-year-old master modestly professes to not playing as well as he might. "But I hope," he says, "to be an accomplished violinist by the time I'm 120."

It may have been fortunate that former Astronaut Jack Swigert, 51, has once before survived the icy chill of near tragedy. On his 1970 Apollo 13 journey to the moon, an oxygen tank exploded, prompting a harrowing 3½-day journey back to earth. Now Swigert is undertaking another tense battle. He has learned he has bone-marrow cancer. The Republican candidate in next month's election for a newly created congressional district in suburban Denver, Swigert decided that he would keep on with the race and that he would not keep quiet about the disease. Says he: "We have 3 million people in this country walking around with controllable cancer. I'm just an average American who got cancer."