Voice Instructor’s Time at MGA Was Short, But Legacy Endured
Author: Sheron Smith
Posted: Wednesday, August 17, 2016 4:13 PM
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Macon, GA
Yet among the mementos she held onto for decades afterward and carted to homes in Hawaii, Oregon and Florida were several photographs from her lone year as a voice instructor at what is now the Cochran Campus of Middle Georgia State University. In addition, Liggett saved a newspaper article about Middle Georgia College’s May Day Festival – an event she organized that became an annual tradition lasting until the late 1990s.
She also kept a letter from a young man she befriended in Cochran. Clearly smitten, he mailed it to Liggett shortly after she left Georgia at the end of the 1934-35 academic year and put down roots in Honolulu.
“I certainly do wish that you were coming back down here in September for I sure do miss you and it is not pleasant not knowing whether I will ever see you again,” he wrote to the pretty brunette on a piece of business letterhead dated July 6, 1935. “I do hope that I will get to see you again real soon. Have a big time but don’t forget us down here.”
Liggett never forgot the folks “down here,” according to her daughter, Sigrid Southworth, who recently mailed her mother’s now-faded photos and the earnestly penned letter, soft and fragile with age, to the Middle Georgia State Library archives.
“She was completely intrigued by Georgia and loved her year there,” Southworth said via email. “She made good friends at Middle Georgia College and they were close enough that she didn’t mind at all their calling her ‘the damn Yankee’ in an endearing and teasing way.”
Apparently it didn’t matter that “the damn Yankee” was actually from the Midwest.
How did a plucky Iowa gal, only 23 and freshly graduated from The Juilliard School in New York City, where she studied voice under Madame Anna E. Schoen-René, wind up teaching at a small college in the Deep South?
According to her written memories, jotted down for a family history project, Liggett – known to friends as Kay – had a job offer in 1934 from a school in Honolulu called Mid-Pacific Institute. One of her former high school English teachers had gone to work there a few years earlier and wrote Liggett asking if she would be interested in filling in for a music instructor who was about to take a sabbatical.
Hawaii? Liggett began packing her bags.
Shortly before the school year began, however, the teacher’s sabbatical was deferred and Liggett was asked to delay her arrival for a year.
While she waited, she needed a regular paycheck. This was during the Great Depression, after all.
So Liggett applied for the voice instructor’s position at what was then Middle Georgia College. Southworth doesn’t know how her mother learned about the Cochran job opening, but Liggett gratefully accepted when then-President Leo H. Browning telegrammed her with an offer.
“The magnificent salary was $25.00 a month, plus a room in the Girl’s Dormitory, plus board in the college dining room, plus use of a studio for any private teaching I might do,” Liggett wrote years later. “It was surely life on a shoe-string.”
At times, Liggett puzzled over the fascination the U.S. Civil War still held for many citizens of her new community. But they heaped huge helpings of Southern hospitality upon her – invitations to Sunday dinners and the like – that the pittance-paid faculty member deeply appreciated.
Liggett plunged headfirst into campus life but, 81 years after the fact, details of how she came to organize the May Day Festival are few.
A spring holiday in many cultures held at the beginning of the fifth month, May Day was commonly celebrated at American women's colleges and some other academic institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Wikipedia. Festivities usually included dancing and singing, which no doubt appealed to the musical Liggett.
What was apparently the college’s first May Day program, held during Liggett’s one spring in Cochran and largely planned by her, included “old English style” celebrations in the campus “pine grove,” according to the short news account she saved among her papers. A queen, presumably a young woman from the student body, was coronated, followed by a folk dance, including the “winding of the maypole.”
Variations of the festival endured long after Liggett left. The college dropped the regal courts at some point, but informal dances continued.
The University System of Georgia’s 1998 switch from the quarter system to semesters, which pushed early May close to spring final exams, ended the college’s annual celebration.
By then, Liggett was in her late 80s and living in Portland, Ore., a hardy widow losing her hearing to a neurological disorder but keeping her mind sharp by reading nearly a book a day and learning how to use a computer, from which she dispatched chatty emails to family and friends.
She had taken the teaching job in Hawaii after leaving Cochran in 1935. Liggett eventually married a man from Maui named Sevath Boyum and had three children. Southworth, the couple’s first born, worked in Oahu schools for 37 years and continues to live in Hawaii with her husband. A son, also named Sevath but nicknamed “Pete,” was a career U.S. Marine, which included a stint flying Marine One, the president’s helicopter. Daughter Kirsten was an accountant for Northwestern Natural Gas Co. in Portland for more than three decades.
In the earlier years, the family moved around Hawaii a lot due to Boyum’s Army career and his later work with Standard Oil. Liggett spent her adult life engaged in many overlapping activities, including rearing her children, volunteering with the PTA, directing a girls boarding school, curating at a museum, doting on grandchildren and great-grandchildren and maintaining a 7-acre Hawaiian country homestead that came with a single cow.
The word that best describes her mother, Southworth said, is “fun.”
“She was quick to jump into every opportunity that came along and she was always interested in everything,” Southworth said. “She read widely. She loved people, and people loved her. She had a wonderful sense of humor. She loved to hike and did so into her mid-70s when (her medical disorder) began to affect the muscles in her legs. She was known for her letter writing and maintained a huge correspondence almost to the end of her life.”
Liggett and her husband moved to Portland in the late 1980s. After Boyum’s death, Liggett lived for a time in Palm Harbor, Fla., to be closer to grandchildren before moving back to Oregon.
She died there in 2012, age 101.
Liggett never returned to Cochran after her year at the college, but Southworth and her husband took a detour to the town in 2004 as they were driving from Atlanta to Tampa, Fla. They enjoyed visiting the lovely campus that gave Liggett her professional start and left her with a lifetime supply of warm memories.
“She remembered with great joy the May Day celebration that she had organized,” Southworth said. “I think that her entire year there was a very happy one.”
Photo: Katherine Liggett Boyum around the time she taught voice at the former Middle Georgia College. The inset photo shows participants in the 1935 May Day program on the Cochran Campus. On the back of the original photo, they are identified as Evelyn Fisher and Zach Browning. Images courtesy of Sigrid Southworth.