Mary Floyd Holton
July 22, 1926 - February 27, 2003
FLOYDS WILL BECOME
CLASSICAL MUSIC AFICIONADOS
As told by Mary Floyd Holton in December 1983
My parents, brought up as they were, … (didn’t have) much culture in their families and when I was growing up my father always did things periodically with great enthusiasm. He decided, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, that the family was going to become classical music aficionados. My mother, he and me. So he got a Stromberg-Carlson radio-phonograph, season tickets to the opera and to the symphony. All at once as I remember.
My mother always listened to the opera but there was never any music as such. We had a piano and I started taking lessons but I figured that was because Louise Elworth’s mother got a piano and had Louise take lessons. We struggled through that for many, many years. This happened all of a sudden. I took to it. I really enjoyed it. And my mother did. But I know, from talking to her about it later, that it was sort of an off-on switch decision, for some reason, Harry Edmund Floyd decided classical music was his thing. What he wanted was done. The records started to appear, I remember. It might have been Victor which started to put them out like the Book-of-the-Month. My mother told me later that my father got from somebody a list of the 100 most important pieces of music ever written and over a period of a month, a couple of months maybe, all of the records appeared. I don’t remember my father playing them. He may or may not have. But we went to the opera and we went to the symphony – Symphony Hall.
I can remember being bored to death and I can also remember going to hear Carmen. Louise Elworth went along for some reason. It was Giovanni Martinelli, who was maybe 5’5’ and very fat, and Helen Jepson who was – no, it was Aida – very tall and thin and very blond. I thought this was extremely funny at age 8 or 9. Who is going to appreciate the music when you look at the funny people on the stage and laughed about it – thought it was very funny – and I was marched out and given to an usher and they picked me up when it was over. He (Dad) had to have thought it was funny. [Comments by others about “little tiny fat man and this great big tall thin woman singing love songs”]
… singing like idiots.. Celeste Aida .. he’s there singing to his love – she’s not on the stage at the time .. but she’s 2 feet taller than he is … no appreciation for the music. Bill’s family, the music was there. You were brought up with it because your mother was … [Bill: “But it wasn’t the classical.”]
No, but it was the same kind of thing. The music was always there and your Father loved to sing and sang well. You grew up with it the way I sort of hope our kids grew up with some kind of music, instead of like it was in my family. At least I got exposed to it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have. (For H. Floyd) it was a sudden decision that there had been a lack of something in our background and “We’re gonna get it!”
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Note: In late 1983 and early 1984 Mary and Bill Holton, Michael King and Joe and Julia Todd got together a number of times to swap family stories. They were recorded. Mary Holton transcribed the tapes. This story is from her transcription of one of the story times in December 1983. Pictures: Mary Floyd in 1935 about age 9; Mildred and Harry Floyd in 1937
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