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Frank Forest was an American operatic tenor and actor who enjoyed success in the 1930s and 40s. Frank Forest was born Frank Hayek in St. Paul,... Minnesota on October 17, 1896. He studied pianoforte and singing and at twelve was singing as a soloist in a church choir. At seventeen he taught piano and voice. Later he went to New York and became a salesman, eventually becoming a sales manager. He studied singing in Italy and made his operatic debut in 1928, becoming famous in operatic circles. Forest studied agricultural engineering at the University of Minnesota, and later helped found the profitable pharmaceutical firm White Laboratories of Kenilworth, New Jersey. He gave up the business to follow a lifelong interest in singing. He spent twelve years performing leading tenor roles in opera houses all over Europe and acted in several films, including I'll Take Romance along with American soprano and actress Grace Moore in 1937. In 1955 he started pouring his energies and money into the creation of the Empire State Festival, a New York summer opera festival.
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Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state on May 11, 1858. Known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes", the state's name comes from a Dakota word for "sky-tinted water". Those waters, together with forests, parks, and wilderness areas, offer residents and tourists a variety of outdoor recreational... opportunities. Minnesota is the 12th most extensive and the 21st most populous of the 50 United States. Nearly 60% of Minnesota's residents live in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area known as the "Twin Cities", the center of transportation, business, industry and education, and home to an internationally known arts community. The remainder of the state consists of western prairies now given over to intensive agriculture; deciduous forests in the southeast, now cleared, farmed and settled; and the less populated North Woods, used for mining, forestry, and recreation. Minnesota is known for its relatively mixed social and political orientations, and has a high rate of civic participation and voter turnout.
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