Recollections of Mary V. Dodge

Posted on February 28, 2020

By Janet Dodge Martin

The previous Alumni News issue included an excerpt from an interview with Linda Neale (PJS 1967), granddaughter of Ruth Saunders Leupold, a violin student of Mary Dodge in rural Harney County, Oregon, beginning about 1910. This account of Mary Dodge’s life is from a conversation with Janet Dodge Martin, her granddaughter. Many of Janet’s recollections are from her childhood growing up with her grandmother living in the house. She remembers her as an impatient old woman who had had a very hard life and who was dedicated to teaching violin technique, much more than to teaching a general overview of music.

Janet consulted extensively with the OPB’s Oregon Experience executive producer Nadine Jelsing, as OPB created the Sagebrush Orchestra episode in 2009. This 30-minute program, which can be streamed and airs from time to time on OPB TV, highlights the children’s orchestra that Mary Dodge established in Burns prior to World War I. The group was the prototype for the Portland Junior Symphony that Mary later founded in 1924, in Portland. Janet and her brother Stew Dodge went to Burns in 2010, to celebrate the centennial of the Sagebrush Orchestra, when PYP also went to give a concert kicking-off the fundraising effort for a new Burns Performing Arts Center.

Mary V. Dodge was born December 13, 1876 in Arkansas. Her given name was Mary Bourne Thompson. Her father was a New England attorney who worked in the South during Reconstruction. He died in 1880. After his death, Mary’s mother, who was a trained pianist from Maine, went back to New England to go to nursing school in order to support her family. She had four children, all of whom were introduced to music at an early age, two boys and two girls. Mary was well aware of her mother’s preference for educating the boys in the family over the girls. To balance her responsibilities and accomplish her goals, Mrs. Thompson gave up her two girls to a “soldiers’ and sailors’ home” which was an orphanage for children of Civil War veterans.

The orphanage was a terrible experience for both Mary and her sister Sadie; all the children suffered from hunger and cold. At one point Mary intentionally broke a bone so she could go to the infirmary where it was warmer. Eventually, the sisters were transferred to a school run by Catholic nuns who introduced Mary to the violin. She bonded deeply with the instrument, so much so that later, as an adult, she took its name as her middle name, Mary V. Dodge.

Around 1895 Mary graduated from school with a teaching certificate, and worked in New England and New York City as a teacher. But she didn’t like the rough schools she was assigned to, and decided to follow a classmate who had secured a job in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, after traveling all the way across the country by herself on the train, she was not impressed with L.A. either, so Mary traveled up the coast to Portland, where one of her aunts owned a Victorian boarding house across from the Pioneer Courthouse on 3rd Ave. She taught at Shattuck School, while working at the boarding house. It was there in 1910, at “Le Maison” that Mary met and married Mott Dodge, a civil engineer.

Mott got a job in Harney County platting the roads and Mary followed him. They lived for nearly two years in a canvas tent before they could build a very small house. Mary fascinated the town children while playing her violin every day! She drew them into her musical sphere and began teaching almost immediately. Her son Glen (Janet’s father) was born in Burns on May 1, 1911. Mary took him before he was 2 years old to Boston to visit family. While she was away, she sent letters to her husband (Janet has these letters written by Mary, because Mott saved them all). She told him that when she returned, she would set up a teaching studio in his office! And this is when she envisioned the Sagebrush Orchestra. It would become her project for the next five years.

About the time Mary convinced her sister Sadie to move to Burns from Boston, Mott was offered a job in Portland. The Dodges moved to Portland and bought a home in the Irvington neighborhood. But the job never materialized, so Mott went back to Burns. Mary, however, stayed in Portland. (Janet thinks it is odd for Mary to have abandoned her sister after convincing her to move there.)

Mary taught violin in her house across from Irvington School, where she was employed as the music teacher. She organized a small orchestra and they practiced in her attic, but she never saw herself as a conductor of orchestras. Of course, there were no role models of women conductors then. She was a teacher obsessed with finding the most effective way to teach and to learn the violin. She studied at the local Chiropractic College about body mechanics to discover the most efficient ways to hold a bow arm. She developed a technique to teach her students, convinced that any child with interest could make good music using her methods. She was very strict. In 1923, she took one of her students, MaryAnn Holt, to France to work with a teacher there who shared her interest in efficient body mechanics.

When Mary returned from France, she founded the Portland Junior Symphony and hired Jacques Gershkovitch, a Russian immigrant, to be the conductor. Her son Glen, who played French horn, Linda Neale’s grandmother Ruth Saunders, and many of Mary’s private and Irvington School students were among the original members.

Mary V. Dodge and Harney County students, ca. 1913.

Mary moved in with her son Glen and his family around 1946. She lived on the second floor and taught in the basement. In the late 1940s she was diagnosed with cancer. As her illness progressed, her husband Mott moved into a room in the basement, but they rarely spoke. Mary remained connected to the Portland Junior Symphony, as an admirer and champion of the potential for children to make in-credible music, until her death on December 31, 1954. She lived to see the baton passed from Jacques Gershkovitch who died on August 12, 1953, to Jacob Avshalomov, who succeeded him in 1954.