Music education in Ekalaka in the 1940s and 50s

During the dry Depression years, my parents, Lee and Mildred Coons Lavell, traveled all over Montana, Idaho and Washington looking for work for my dad. The only thing predictable about our lives was another brown-eyed-baby born every two years. Finally, early in 1944, when I was 7, they bought a house at Ekalaka. It was the 34th move in their 11-year marriage.

The house had three small rooms and was built into the side of a hill across from the cemetery. The day we moved in, we children burst in to explore, of course, and there, in the living room, was a reed organ! I could not leave it alone but was constantly pulling the stops, pumping the pedals, and pressing the keys. Our neighbor Viola Henderson had studied voice and violin and worked for a piano teacher in Seattle. I began taking lessons from her in exchange for babysitting their three little boys, helping her in the house, and working in their dairy. That the organ was there, and Viola there to teach me, seem like wonderful gifts that I was given.

The little boys were delightful to baby sit. In doing housework for Viola, I learned a great deal. One example is that she taught me how to use a vacuum cleaner, which I had never heard of before. In the dairy, I would wash bottles and bottle the milk, also clean up after the cows in the dairy barn. It was all worth it when we got to that one hour in the week where she taught me the classics from the instruction books in her piano bench. Vi became like a second mother to me, teaching me so much, trimming my hair, quickly altering a hand-me-down blouse when the sleeves didn’t fit right.

My mother was a great encouragement to me in practicing during the week. She would call out from the kitchen, “That was beautiful. Will you please play it again?”

With Dad, it was “Could you stop that for awhile? I can hardly think.” J

He was away working quite a bit. So I was able to get the practicing in.

I always liked school but the music classes at Ekalaka Grade School were the best. When a music teacher named Mr. Bernard Niemi taught us to sing harmony in 4th grade, I thought I had died and gone into heaven! And I began accompanying the songs, alternating with fellow classmate Shirley Richmond, who was very good at it. The old songs we learned in those classes, such as “Santa Lucia” and “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” have stayed with me and I love them so very much.

When I was in 8th grade, Viola said she had taken me as far as she could. She had talked with Mrs. Betty Gee, who taught piano to most of Ekalaka’s children, and she had agreed to teach me pro bono. By then, I was working at the Ekalaka Telephone Company, and later, when I was a junior at Carter County High School, I worked at The Ekalaka Eagle. So I said I could pay for my own lessons. The hours I spent at Mrs. Gee’s little vine-covered cottage on the bank of Russell Creek were unforgettable too. I am still in awe that this gracious woman came into my life.

In high school, I got to accompany the chorus, play the graduation march for the seniors, play in Mrs. Gee’s recitals in the old stone Congregational Church and entertain at The Geological Society annual meeting. I accompanied the hymns at our little store front Pentecostal Church and, on my 16th birthday, played the wedding march when our pastor, Miss Eva Miller, married a local rancher.

Music has been a big part of my adult life as I played for church, weddings and funerals and taught piano students in the Montana towns where we lived due to my husband’s work for the Rural Electric. And now, at 83, I still play preludes every week at my Presbyterian Church here in the Portland area and have a couple of students.

Hundreds of songs come into my mind day and night. And I think about the house folded into a slope on the outskirts of town, the reed organ, Viola, Mrs. Gee, the music classes at school, and Ekalaka. I wonder if the house has been torn down now. I wonder if the reed organ still exists and, if so, where it is. I would like to come back for a couple of days to play some of the old songs and see if anyone still remembers them as I do.