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CC: Was that with the Seattle Public Schools, was that when you first started?

MM: Yeah, Seattle Public Schools. Although all my life I've been teaching privately, I might only have one or two, but at one point, I had twenty private students. So I was doing public school teaching which was interesting because then I was on the same level as Mr. Kaiyala, I mean, we were colleagues, and I had to call him by his first name, and that was really hard for me to do. But what was really hard to do was call Mr. Sokol by his first name. I never could. When Jim was in the hospital and he came to see Jim, he says, "You got to call me Bill." I said, "I don't think I can." Because his name was Vilem Sokol, everybody that's an adult called him Bill;." He's Mr. Sokol to me. And so he says, "Okay, now, on three, call me Bill. One, two, three." Nothing. [Laughs] I said, "I'll try it again," and I called him Bill once. I've never been able to call him Bill. In any case, where was I going with this? Anyway, so I did teach in public schools, well, all the instruments except I didn't teach oboe or some exotic instrument, all the other instruments, so that was my main job. But then I would, after that, let's see, what did I do? Oh, I retired. [Laughs] But no, while I was also teaching, because it didn't pay enough as a teacher, I didn't get paid enough really as a teacher. So I also took other jobs, three months, playing. You get paid for playing in different orchestras, sometimes you get calls for being a ringer in Yakima or Wenatchee or wherever. And Juneau, in fact, I played up in Alaska. And I'd get to do that, and I also played in quartets where we got paid and we had to negotiate our pay. And different smaller orchestras, I mean, that performed around here -- it's hard to explain -- but there were different people who tried conducting and wanted to have a paid orchestra. So I'd get called and I never had to audition, that was the nice thing, because I didn't have to audition because I knew other people. And one of the important things when you're in this line of work is having a chain of people that you know, and so everybody knew me from college and how I played already, so they didn't have to audition me. So it's by word of mouth mostly.

The one time I did audition for the Seattle Symphony, I was really worried, so I took lessons from Mr. Eisenberg, who was the second violinist in the Philadelphia String Quartet. And he was sure I was going to make it, but you know what? I got in there, it's the only time I ever auditioned, and I thought, "If I screw this up, I'm going to really be pissed off." But the thing that I was really happy about was that I didn't break down and start crying. Because you go in there, and you go onstage, there's this guy with a stopwatch, there's a committee behind this curtain, and there's this guy sitting over here who I knew, Morrie Simon. He's in the symphony, and he knew I was playing. I was so, so nervous that I couldn't finish my two minute solo. I got maybe a little over halfway and I started hyperventilating, so I couldn't finish. So I knew I wasn't going to make it because you have to do your two minutes. But they made me actually do the other orchestral stuff, too. I don't know why, because I knew that I was going to be called back as a finalist, but that was the only time I had to actually audition. But I was told that if you're going to audition, you really need to do a bunch because it's a practice. You have to practice auditioning, and I hadn't had that practice. But when I graduated, if I had just auditioned then, I probably would have made it because I was the top of my form, but you had to have money to actually join the musicians union and you couldn't audition until you actually joined the musicians union. And I thought, what if I pay all this money and I don't make it? I'll have wasted all this money, and I couldn't ask my parents for that money, and I couldn't ask Nori for that money because he didn't have any money, I mean, he was in school. So I thought, oh, forget it, I just won't play in the symphony. But that was it.

CC: Didn't you play with Quincy Jones at one point?

MM: Oh, yeah, that was one of my freelance...

CC: One of your gigs?

MM: Yeah, gigs. I used to play with, that was the thing, if you belonged to the... finally I did join the union because I had enough money from my teaching. But you had to be in the union to play these gigs, and so I got called for Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Gayle whatever her last name was, the one with long hair, really long hair. And so different people, and those were fun, and you got paid a lot. I mean, they paid really well. And then I even played once for a studio job for Alaska Airlines, and then just went in for twenty minutes, did the job, got residuals for, I don't know, two years, which was really nice. It ended up paying a lot, because you only did the twenty minutes and then you were out and getting residuals. But that's very hard to do.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.