Ann Hallmark and Amanda Ekery

[00:00] AMANDA EKERY: My name is Amanda Ekery I'm 28. Today is January 6, 2023, and we are in El Paso, Texas. The interview partner is Ann Hallmark, and we are friends, and she's my teacher.

[00:17] ANN HALLMARK: I'm Ann Hallmark. Today is January 6, 2023, and we're in El Paso, Texas, and my interview partner is Amanda Ekery and we are friends now and have been in the position of student and teacher earlier.

[00:41] AMANDA EKERY: Nice. Yay. Well, thank you for doing this. This is Hallmark. I wanted you specifically, when they were talking about doing this, I was like, oh, I'm going to ask this homework to do this just because you've been my favorite teacher.

[00:56] ANN HALLMARK: Like, oh, I'm touched.

[01:00] AMANDA EKERY: I can't believe I cried. But really, like.

[01:06] ANN HALLMARK: Well, I remember when you came, I thought you were remembering back that I remember especially what you were doing in third grade. Thinking to myself, this girl is really has so much ability. And I thought, won't it be fun to watch and see what she develops into?

[01:37] AMANDA EKERY: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so much has changed, like, since I've known you. But, you know, we're both music teachers now. And I'm just curious, like, every time when I teach, too, I think, like, oh, bead gone catfishing, you know, all of our routines. But then also, like, just, like, the kindness that you had as a teacher. And so I'm wondering, like, how, how did you, how did you become a teacher? Like, what was your earliest music memory?

[02:05] ANN HALLMARK: I think I was trying to remember backd, but when I was almost four, my aunt, who was a piano teacher, and her husband and daughter moved in with us in central Texas. And I remember standing in back of Aunt Sarah, and she was teaching both her daughter and my brother and just kind of standing there with my finger in my mouth watching them. And I one day I said to Aunt Sarah, won't you teach me? And she said, no, you're too young. And I said, aunt Sarah, if you'll watch, I'll play what my brother is playing. And she said, okay, do it. And of course, it was not finished at all, but she could tell that I had been watching my brother. And so she said, I'll teach you. So she was my teacher from that time. I was four then, until I graduated from high school when I was 16. And I could tell how much music had meant to her. She was the church organist. And also, as any younger child, I wanted to be like my brother and cousin. So our household. My grandmother was a piano teacher, and I had two first cousins who were piano teachers. And so it was sort of a tradition, really, to make music. The family would gather around. We had, I still have it, a songbook, the color of these walls, kind of yellow. And we would start at the first, and daddy and mother were standing behind. And my brother, who was much more advanced than I, he would play the first maybe ten pieces, and we'd all sing. The first piece was the battle hymn of the republic. And then he would get up and I would play and we'd all sing. And I see over this period of about over 80 years that I don't see families gathering around pianos and singing. And those many years ago, there were many activities that we would go on, like hayrides or church activities, and we would all be together and we could all sing, by memory, 25 or 30 pieces. Kumbaya, someone's knocking at the door. How many different. The Stephen Foster songs are down in the valley or rounds. Row, row, row your boat. And of course, one group would always not get in on their time. But I don't see that now after, when I have a group of children for theory and I'll say, let's sing row, row, row your boat, they'll all kind of giggle and say, we don't sing. They don't know those songs that I consider the glue of our culture, truly. And that that early time influenced me a lot because, of course, I wanted to keep up with my brother. I didn't. But those were my earliest memories.

[07:01] AMANDA EKERY: How did you, like, consume music? Like, did they have, like, you listened on the radio, but did you buy, like, records or was it just okay.

[07:11] ANN HALLMARK: These big, clunky plastic seventy eight s. And we would listen to. There was a program called on Saturday night, the top ten. And we would listen. And those were the popular songs that would move up through the. However they were judging. And Frank Sinatra was making his appearance, and Bing Crosby. And so we would gather sometimes as a family, my parents weren't as interested in that. Or some girls would come over and we'd all listen to the top ten. And of course, at school dances, that was important, that we knew that knew the lyrics, and we all did. And I still have that popular music at home. So I know one girl said in junior high school, I was teaching her, and she said, I have a project. I need to have all of the music from the second world War. And I said, I've got it. Let's remember Pearl harbor over there, the white cliffs of Dover. Because I felt probably the defining happening for from fifth grade through high school was actually the second world war. And its impact on my individual life and my family. We lived in a university town, Texas A and M, and that was a military school. It had, it graduated more officers in the second world war than West Point. Oh, wow. That's amazing, isn't it?

[09:37] AMANDA EKERY: Mm hmm.

[09:38] ANN HALLMARK: And then when they began to come back after 1945, that made a great influence on me, too, because here, these young men had not been able to be educated because possibly from the depression, they had not had money for college. But suddenly the government was giving them an education. And one of the young men, they didn't have enough rental property in Bryan for people to have housing. And they would ask families if they had an extra bedroom to rent that to the returning veterans on the GI bill, and we did. My grandmother had lived with us, and she had died that January. So this young man called my mother and said, I have a girlfriend in Dallas who will be coming to see me once or twice a month, and could she have a room with you? And it turned out that Bill Fillmore was one of the survivors of the Bataan death march.

[11:02] AMANDA EKERY: This was the man who stayed at your house?

[11:05] ANN HALLMARK: Yes, but we became very, very close friends. He would come every week on Sunday afternoon and have chocolate cake, and he would bring souvenirs from his years in the japanese concentration campsite. And we stayed friends for many years. After he graduated, we went to his wedding, and even when I got married, they were there. So all I'm saying is that the Second World War had a great influence on all of our lives then. That's all that I would say. I was in junior high, and at that time, the junior high had what they called an a capella choir, which, of course, you know what that is. And I. They had a very dynamic director, Yule Porter, who later went to Baylor and took over all of their choral work in Waco. But he had the a capella choir, and both my cousin and I were in that choir, and he was a very dynamic man. And when I describe how people sang a lot, then we would all meet in the auditorium. This was the whole school in the balcony and down on the main floor, everybody in that junior middle school. And we would have a piece of paper with maybe eight or ten songs that could have come from that yellow songbook that we used at home. And the entire school would sing, and he would. The music teacher would play the piano, and he would direct, and it was not unusual for us all to know those pieces. I mean, they were patriotic pieces. They were maybe hymns. And so then when I went to high school, Mister Porter left for Baylor, and they got another choral teacher because they, there was also a high school, a capella choir, and this was a Mister Guthrie. And as I look back at it, he did marvelous things. This was at the beginning of television that most people did not have television. I mean, they knew of it, but they just didn't have private sets. And so there was a contest by the Lions Club of Brian and, well, the whole United States, because they had a convention every summer, and that convention was to be in San Francisco. And we recorded something. We would, we recorded something to submit it. Mister Guthrie did, and we won that competition to go to San Francisco and sing for the national Lions convention. And for a little, for a small little town of 24,000. The whole town raised the money, and we got on the sunset limited, which started out, and the whole town turned out for that choir. We were on a train for two and a half days because we would stop. We went to Salt Lake City and sang on the steps of the Mormon tabernacle, and we heard the Mormon Tabernacle choir and went by way of Denver, Salt Lake City, and ended up going across on the ferry. And these are kind of country kids. That's all we were. But we sang for that convention, and we did have elegant robes. We had green velvet robes with white satin surplices over them. And it was a thrill to do that. And, of course, there was a lot of mischief on the train going over for those two days. So that was. And during the year, the choir always took a spring trip, and we would travel through Texas for about four days, maybe five days. We would stay with families and then be presented mostly in churches or convention centers, and we would sing. So that made a really big impression on me. I was, when we practiced, I was the accompanist for the choir. And when we tried, oh, the Houston Symphony had a contest in which it was the first time that they had recorded a program of the Brahms Requiem, and they wanted a choir to singhenne the parts of it, and the name of was one of the great choruses. How lovely are thy dwelling places. And so we tried out for that at Ut Austin, and I accompanied that, and we won, and so we got to go to Houston. And under these hot lights, they recorded that with the Houston Symphony to be broadcast. And that was a thrill. So these experiences made me know that I liked, that I was, that music was a big part of my life.

[18:36] AMANDA EKERY: Mm hmm. So when it came time to, like, go to college, was it music or nothing?

[18:42] ANN HALLMARK: No. When I graduated, I was so dumb in that I thought my brother was in medical school at the time, and I thought, I want to go to medical school. So I was 16 years old, and a and m was a boys school at that time, but children of the faculty could go in the summertime. So I went and took chemistry and things for a pre medden. So when it, I thought, I'll always have my music. So this is something different. And when I went to ut that first year, I was doing pre med, and at the end of that year, I had a date with someone who knew my family. And at the end of the date he said, I hear you're a pianist. And I said, yes, I am. And he said, well, play something for me. And I just completely bombed it. I couldn't play anything because I had not touched the piano for that whole year. I was so shocked because I thought I would always had what I had. So the very next day I went to the music department and said, I want to. I want to get a music degree. And at that time, women had choices of being secretaries, teachers or nurses. Oh, there were some other things, but not very many ventured that way. So I said, well, for a music teacher, I guess. And my option was a, it was a five year course, and there I'd lost one year doing that other. So I was very happy to be back in with music, except I had always turned my back on theory, and so it was a steep learning curve to do that. So it was music education and with a piano principle, and that was the beginning of the road.

[21:38] AMANDA EKERY: What was ut like? Did they make you learn other instruments or.

[21:43] ANN HALLMARK: I had to learn every instrument in the symphony orchestra, harp, flute. I could never get my breath across those holes. And there you're able to do that easily. But it was such a struggle.

[22:00] AMANDA EKERY: What was your favorite or least favorite flute? Most favorite?

[22:06] ANN HALLMARK: I was not. I kind of liked the trumpet. I loved the sound of the trumpet. I had taken violin when I was in third grade, when they had a youth symphony there, but then they stopped it. But I even had studied violin through college. I was not very good. You just have so much practice time and you have to make some choices. So ut at that time was a very small college within the university, and the dean was a nationally regarded organist. And so he was pushing organ, and I sure took organ, but my teacher was a young man who was in love, and he would cut. He would just simply put on the organ. He said, you have a cut in today's class. So I didn't have learned very much in Oregon. But Dolly's franz was a very well known pianist, and he ran the piano department. And I thought the theory that was offered was first rate of. And sometimes our classes only had three people in them.

[23:55] AMANDA EKERY: That's nice.

[23:56] ANN HALLMARK: And I remember one of my teachers, Verna Harter, was German. And so there were three of us in her class. And she said, you know, I like to cook. Just after class, let's go over to my apartment and let's have supper. So we would go over and for that. So it was a very intimate. You knew everyone in the music school, everyone, because you'd been in class with them. And I liked it. And then when school had finished, I had kind of catch up. And every semester I took either 18 or 20 hours because I wanted to graduate with my class. And we went into the Austin schools and did our practice teaching, and I liked that a lot. And where did they put you?

[25:08] AMANDA EKERY: Like, what? What type of school did they pair you with?

[25:11] ANN HALLMARK: It was a junior high, so it was through 9th grade. And you taught standing up in back of a spinet piano, and you directed your class. And there were such interesting kids on the south side of Austin. It was right across from the school for the deafenhouse, the Texas school for the deaf. And the teacher that I did my practice teaching with was a pro. She had been there, I'm sure she had been there 35 plus years. And she was very kind to me, and she recommended that they hire me the next year. So that was my first job.

[26:07] AMANDA EKERY: Okay. And did you teach piano, or was it like, choral or.

[26:11] ANN HALLMARK: It was choral, but I had to play the piano for my class to play. And it was also music appreciation. They didn't have enough music classes. And that school was my first school where I taught. They did something odd. They took the youngest, they would take, I'm interrupting my train of thought, but they. Everyone had a test for their iq, so the youngest quickest were called, let's say, the 7th grade, the seven a's. Then the next youngest and quickest were the seven b's. And I had such a funny thing happen. I was teaching. I was teaching the seven A's and the seven K's. So you can imagine. I mean, those are, those children were not even able to find their number of pages in the textbook. And so just before Christmas, I had taught all these Christmas carols from around the world because I was always interested in foreign countries. And so I said, okay, now after Christmas, I'm going to ask each one of you if you will tell me if you've heard any of these. And I had taught O Tannenbaum, O Tanibam and so on. And so after Christmas, the class came back and I said, I told you I was going to ask if you'd heard any of these Christmas pieces. And have you? And this boy, who was for a 7th grade, he was about 14 or 15 tall, his name was Raymond. And he said, I heard one. And I said, well, tell me what you heard. And he said, I heard the one about the atomic bomb. And I said, well, sing it for me. And so he said, atomic bomb? Well, that was the best he could do. But at least he had remembered that. So that was. I remember I had lived that year. That was the second year that I had taught. It was in Austin. Again, it was in the same school. But I had saved money all year long. I had projected that I would live on $100 a month. And for the whole year I was only. I was only paid $2,790 for the whole nine months. So there had to be a lot of figuring on how to make it work. I did direct the choir and play for a little church, the first christian church in south Austin. And so that was a little bit more. But what happened was that I saved that money to go to Europe. And I caught. I read about a ship that had been a troop ship during the second world war that you could catch in Quebec, Canada. And so I made arrangements and paid for my ticket on that and got on the a Greyhound bus in Austin, Texas. And my father had come and he helped me average grades so I could make. I think I had to leave a day or so before the end of school, but my dad helped, helped me finish my grading. And so I caught that bus from Austin to Quebec, Canada. And we got on this troop ship. It was registered under the liberian flag. And it was going to take five days to cross the Atlantic. And it was such fun because on that ship were teachers and students who were like me. But there were a lot of professors from colleges and they would have classes all day long on history of the countries that we were going to. And there were a lot of musicians on that, and singers particularly. And they needed an accompanist. So I accompanied them and we would put on programs at night on those five days of crossing the Atlantic. But when the boat got to London, to the Thames, they wouldn't let the boat dock in London. We had to stay out in the middle because Lloyds of London would not insure that boat. So we had to go in. In a little tiny boat to London. And so I stayed. I stayed in Europe those almost three months, doing hosteling, going from one hostel to the other, and even caught the Salzburg music festival in Salzburg, which was a thrill. And there was always someone to hook up with who had been where you were going or had been and could tell you what the best things were.

[33:25] AMANDA EKERY: How many countries have you been to?

[33:28] ANN HALLMARK: I think I've been to 93, I think. I think.

[33:35] AMANDA EKERY: Yeah, you go all over. So when did you have to come back for the start of the school year?

[33:41] ANN HALLMARK: Yes, I was teaching in Port Arthur that next year, and the reason I had some friends who, we were looking at salaries because Austin was at the bottom of the list for salaries because they could just pick anyone they wanted.

[34:03] AMANDA EKERY: Was Austen like the music city that it is now. Then there are a lot of musicians.

[34:08] ANN HALLMARK: They didn't have the wonderful south by Southwest that they had then. No, it didn't have that feel about. It was really a classical music, the Austin Symphony, the Austin Ballet, that sort of thing. And so it has a much wider appeal now than it did then. But I went to Port Arthur because at that time, except for Andrews, Texas, it had the highest pay check for teachers. And there were four of us who shared an apartment there. We'd known one another at Ut, and we just had fun.

[35:00] AMANDA EKERY: So when did you come to El Paso?

[35:02] ANN HALLMARK: I came to El Paso in 65, and I'd never been to El Paso before in my life. I remember we came to El Paso on the train, and we'd left our children with their grandparents, and we came and we arrived at night and we stayed at a motel on Mesa that's still there. But it was dark. And so the next morning I raised the window and I said, there are mountains. And I was thrilled to death because I, both my husband and I love the color of waters and the different cultures that were here. So that was a good choice.

[36:12] AMANDA EKERY: Did you teach in a classroom here or. I.

[36:19] ANN HALLMARK: What? I did, I had written ahead to Ross Capshaw, who was head of. That's Mister Capshaw's father.

[36:29] AMANDA EKERY: Our band room's named after him.

[36:32] ANN HALLMARK: I had written him and asked him because I had experience in Dallas and Austin for the same type of job, but he never even answered me. So when we came here, I had three. Three little children. And so where did I work first? Oh, I went to Mary Lou Wade, who had, I'd been told, was a piano teacher here. And I said, mary Lou, I want to teach piano, and I'm wondering if you will help me if you have students that you don't have room for. And she was very helpful. And then at that same time, at St. Clements, the director of the school was in a Bible study group with Bruce and me. And so at the last minute, just as school was opening, he said, at St. Clement's, we do not have a music teacher. So I was teaching school in the morning, and I had. I came home and started teaching at 03:00 in the afternoon. Piano. But that was. That was too much with three children at that time. And so I said I was not going to teach school anymore, although that was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Because, you know, you could put on musicals. We did Mary Poppins and sang and performed on stage, which was fun. And so from that point on, I was just developing a piano class.

[38:54] AMANDA EKERY: And then I met you. And fun, and then I met you many years later. I think we only have a minute left, but do you want to add anything? What were you thinking about?

[39:06] ANN HALLMARK: Except that music has been probably the richest portion into my life, and I don't regret at all not going to medical school.

[39:20] AMANDA EKERY: Agreed. Yeah. You meet a lot more people and get introduced to a lot of different backgrounds of everything.

[39:28] ANN HALLMARK: Oh, I have meth. I still write to or call or talk with. That has been very important. I thank God for that.

[39:47] AMANDA EKERY: Well, thank you for doing this, and thanks for having us.