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Sad to report that the much loved wife of W Bro Wilhelm Martin, our organist, died on the 12th January 2015 after a long illness. Her family were here from Brazil at the time and, as a result, the funeral took place too quickly for us to arrange lodge participation, but we are thinking of Wilhelm.
Like Wilhelm himself, Senora Martin was Brazilian born – actually from Ipanema, the city of the legendary beach – and so some of us thought of Wilhelm’s good lady as the girl from Ipanema, after a song enormously popular in the mid 1960s. The song was inspired by another beautiful young girl who, living on Montenegro Street in the fashionable Ipanema district of Rio de Janeiro, strolled past the popular Veloso bar-café every day. The music was written by Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim and is the second most recorded pop song in history (after Yesterday by the Beatles.)
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