Old Missoula

Former Missoula Girl Now Draws Ten Dollars a Minute (1917)

Member of Chicago Grand Opera Company and Church Vocalist.

From $10 a week as a telephone operator to a member of the Chicago Grand Opera company, in many cases receiving as high as $10 a minute for singing her arias in Italian, Spanish, French, or English is the long jump quickly made by a former Missoula girl, Miss Margery Maxwell now a resident of Chicago, hardly past 21 years.

Miss Maxwell is a graduate of the Jefferson high school at Portland, Oregon, later attending one year at the University of Montana at Missoula. She met some of her sorority sisters in Portland and Miss Maxwell’s voice that year was heard at the national convention of the sorority at Gearhart, Oregon.

Scores Big Success.

Miss Maxwell made a distinct hit. The Portland alumni later were persuaded to gather a fund for Miss Maxwell’s musical education and before the end of 1915 Miss Maxwell was studying music under Chicago’s best instructors. She studied Spanish, French and Italian, and before the year had passed she had mastered them and was singing in concert before the most critical of audiences in the east.

Miss Maxwell has signed already for a six weeks Chautauqua tour in the east. Miss Maxwell also is soprano in an Evanston, Illinois, Congregational church.

A Student in Missoula.

Margery Maxwell is the daughter of Mrs. A. C. Hollenbeck, residing now in Butte. Her step-sister, Miss Bessie Hollenbeck, lives in Missoula. Miss Maxwell could sing before she could talk and loved to sing, as her friends and relatives loved to hear her. She also plays the piano. She graduated from a high school course in Portland, Oregon, and took some work in the University of Montana. She is a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority in this city. She has been studying with Daddi of the Chicago Grand Opera company and has been singing solo parts in a church at Evanston Ill.

 

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on May 26, 1917.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/349072179/?terms=margery%2Bmaxwell

 

Margery Maxwell sang at many different venues in Missoula while still a young girl. As early as 1910, at age 13, her name can be found in The Missoulian, singing solos for a woman’s club and the Elks’ Club minstrels. By 1912 her picture appeared in the Sunday Missoulian[1], with a caption that stated she had spent the previous year in Portland studying vocal music with a professional teacher. It also stated she was the daughter of Arthur B. Maxwell. He was a printer by trade, an amateur musician, and was active in the socialist movement in early Missoula. Originally from South Dakota, Mr. Maxwell had worked in Chicago and then came to Montana in 1910, according to his obituary[2]. Margery’s mother was Mrs. A. C. (Mabel) Hollenbeck by 1914. She was the stepmother of Miss Bess Hollenbeck, a prominent Missoula figure. It’s unclear when the Maxwell parents separated.

Mr. Maxwell married Martha Edith Rolfe[3] in Missoula in 1914 and then moved to Butte, Mt, where he worked on a socialist newspaper. He later lived in Great Falls, Mt. and died there in 1953.

Margery was billed in Missoulian announcements at the Empress Theater in 1914 and was credited in The Missoulian with “making the Sunday shows at the Empress so popular. . .”, singing solos like ‘Don’t Blame It All On Broadway’.

In 1915 she was offered a scholarship in Chicago by the Kappa Alpha Theta organization. Expenses, room, board and vocal instruction were included.

By 1917 she was on a path to a long career in professional Opera. Her name can be found in hundreds of newspapers from that era, usually with glowing reviews of her performances.

 

So, what was Margery Maxwell like? Not what you might think.

 

An interview (see below) with this remarkable lady appeared in a Davenport, Iowa newspaper in 1930:[4]

 

Miss Margery Maxwell, famous lyric soprano star with the Chicago Civic Opera company, a favorite with the Ravinia opera-goers and the concert world as well as radio public, was bubbling over with enthusiasm and good spirits this morning when your reporter found her at Hotel Blackhawk and, although she confessed that Davenport is not the most restful or the quietest place in the world to sleep, – after a late arrival last night from Chicago – she felt it was a fine, large world and what she would like best was to get out in the sunshine as early as possible.

But there was breakfast to be considered – no, she hadn’t had breakfast yet – and rehearsal, and other things to attend to, before the concert of the afternoon when Miss Maxwell is singing before the Davenport Woman’s club at Friendly House.

“Now what do you want to know?” was the smiling comeback to the usual reportorial inquisitiveness.

Miss Maxwell confessed she was very fond of the radio and liked to sing “on the air,” and has done so many times. “It is a marvelous thing. I am always thrilled when I think of that vast, invisible, country-wide, listening audience of people – some of them in far-off places where they would never hear the music we can give them if it were not for the radio; some of them ill, and all of them eager and so appreciative of the music from the air. The radio is, I feel, one of the most wonderful gifts to mankind of any time. And as time goes on it will improve.”

“No, I do not think the radio will seriously detract from the concerts. For one always loves – when possible – to have the personal touch, the charm of contact, the inspiration of personal appeal, and the atmosphere one associates with a concert where the singer sings directly to the audience.

“Things will grow better and better, I feel, in the radio as well as concert world. For one helps the other.

“As to the grand opera, I think it will always endure. It is a classic. There is nothing can take the place of it.

“I am terribly interested right now,” said this favorite opera star, “in light opera, which is opening this spring in Chicago,” and she went on to say she is to have the leading role in “The Bohemian Girl,” with which the Chicago Civic Opera company is inaugurating a spring season of light opera in the Chicago Civic theatre Easter Monday, April 21. This will be a nine weeks’ season, continuing to the middle of June when Ravinia opens, and Miss Maxwell will also have leading parts in operas to be given there during the summer months.

Miss Maxwell sang in the Tri-cities about five years ago with the Chicago Operatic trio at Augustana. She was scheduled to sing for the Woman’s club at its opening meeting of Oct. 8, 1928, but was called to France to appear in opera there, and her American concert tour had to be canceled. . .

 

In 1943 at the height of WW 2, Margery Maxwell suspended her singing career and volunteered as a Red Cross nurses’ aid at a Chicago hospital. She was appointed a senior director of volunteer aids at Chicago’s Presbyterian Hospital and was eventually placed in charge of all volunteer nurses’ aides at that facility. She had married the surgeon Dr. Frederick B. Moorehead in Chicago in 1931.

She died in Oregon in 1966. Her Obituary below appeared the Chicago Tribune on December 23, 1966[5]:

 

Miss Maxwell, Former Singer Here, Is Dead

Made Her Debut with Chicago Grand Opera

Services for Miss Margery Maxwell, a former Chicago opera and concert singer, will be held today in Sherwood Ore., where she died on Wednesday.

Miss Maxwell, who was Mrs. Charles S. Marsh of near West Lynn, Ore., was 68. She had lived in the west for more than 20 years.

Evanston Church Soloist

Born in Dell Rapids, S. D., Miss Maxwell studied with Francesco Daddi and was soprano soloist at the First Congregational church in Evanston when she made her debut in 1917 with the Chicago Grand opera. She sang with its successor, the Chicago Civic opera, until 1928.

Miss Maxwell was a popular soloist and for a time was soloist with the famed Bohumin Kryl symphony orchestra. She was a soloist for The Tribune’s Chicagoland Music Festival in Soldiers’ field in 1935.

Attended Montana School

She was educated at the University of Montana, where she received a scholarship in music.

Twice widowed, Miss Maxwell had been the wife of the late Dr. Frederick Brown Moorehead, a widely known Chicago oral surgeon who had been a professor of oral surgery and pathology at the University of Illinois’ college of dentistry, and the late James G. Hodgkinson, a Chicago insurance executive. She and Mr. Marsh were married several years ago.

At one time, Miss Maxwell was head of the volunteer nurses’ aid corps at Presbyterian hospital. A brother also survives.