World-class violinist napped along the Leelanau shores.

THE BOOK Joy Fills My Heart by Mozelle
Bennett Sawyer tells the story of the
Traverse City woman’s life, including her
performance at Carnegie Hall.

She was an acclaimed violinist.

She played at Carnegie Hall – and at Lake Leelanau and Suttons Bay.

In the 1920s, the young violinist helped kick off the “resort season” by performing at the annual opening galas at Fountain Point, just south of the village of Lake Leelanau.

The Whitfield family, which had established Fountain Point Resort decades earlier, was family friends, as were the Maishes at Northport Point and a “magician” at Leland.

“Every summer since early childhood, I had either recited or played my violin at the home of Maro the Magician and his wife on Lake Michigan,” Mozelle Bennet Sawyer wrote. “I vividly remember taking my usual nap on a swing on their porch. It was so near the lake, I could hear the waves rolling up onto the shore. Later, in New York, when I took naps before concerts I could bring back the memory of waves on the beach and the blue, blue waters of Lake Michigan.”

Sawyer’s parents lived in Traverse City before moving to Ithaca, Mich., where Mozelle was born. When but a few years old, she moved north with them back to Traverse City, where her father, a jeweler who made violins as a hobby, opened a store despite the presence of two other jewelers.

“Father joined the Odd Fellows Lodge and was the member assigned to start a new lodge in Maple City,” Sawyer wrote, without indicating the exact date. But it was 1976 when she related that the “lodge founded that night is the only surviving one in this part of Michigan. The Traverse City Lodge, and those in neighboring towns, consolidated with the Maple City Lodge, which is still active with a regular ‘fun night’ of euchre for men every week.”

As an adult, Sawyer would become an avid card player herself, but bridge was her game. By the 1970s, the “Mozelle Bennet Sawyer Bridge Club” consisted of as many as 15 tables playing weekly at the Traverse City Elks Lodge, with a number of the players coming from various Leelanau communities.

Sawyer recalled traveling in Grand Traverse County as a teenager and young woman. Area roads were still primitive by present-day standards. She described a 40-plus mile trip to Frankfort, where she taught the violin to others, as “difficult.”

The cars in those days, to her, at least, seemed to be invariably “Model Ts and Franklins.”

Another difficult trip was one to Suttons Bay with two other young women for a performance. Sawyer recalled how the driver of the car had to “stop at every stream” to add water to the radiator. After their arrival at Suttons Bay, “the janitor opened the (building) for our late afternoon rehearsal. Concert time came, and we noticed that there was only one person in the audience – the janitor. It was the wrong night!”

Wishing to further her career, she was able to enroll at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where she met Mr. And Mrs. W.E. Hutton, who were to become important life-long friends. The Hutton’s son, E.F. Hutton, was to make a name for himself in the world of finance and investment.

Young Mozelle would continue to meet and make friends with people from the highest echelons of society and celebrities with country-wide fame – people like John D. Rockefeller and humorist Will Rogers.

After 1920, Mozelle moved to New York City, where she played her violin at private homes, churches, and other venues, including the radio. The culmination of all her playing was an invitation to perform at Carnegie Hall in 1925. There were only two ways to the stage at Carnegie Hall. One was to have exceptional talent, which Mozelle had. The other was the possession of wealth.

“During my years in New York, Florence Foster Jenkins, president of the Verdi Club, invited me to play on a number of programs, usually at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,” Mozelle wrote. “Mrs. Jenkins had a fortune from oil wells and loved to entertain her large club with free dinners and programs featuring young artists. But the highlight of each one was a solo by Florence Foster Jenkins herself.

“Everyone wanted to get invited to the Verdi Club because it was such fun to try to keep from laughing while Florence Foster Jenkins sang. She was intelligent about learning arias – but that voice! Words can’t describe how terrible it was.”

For fun, recordings of Jenkins’ arias were often played on Interlochen Public Radio until a few years ago. During a drive to raise operational funds for the station, some listeners pledged enough funds to get her banned from the airwaves.

Although living in New York, Miss Bennet had an ongoing romantic interest back in Traverse City. Though she highly valued her career, she finally concluded that, particularly after Carnegie Hall, she had reached a pinnacle, and more performing would simply be “repetitive.”

In 1925, she married Charles Sawyer in a Traverse City wedding attended by over 400 people. Charles was the city engineer, and two of his most enduring legacies from that position was the building of the “Miniature City” at Clinch Park and the move of the airport from Ransom Hill to where it is today.

Prior to working for the city, he was involved with a number of projects, including survey work for The Homestead at Glen Arbor. He died in 1952.

In June of 1926, the couple had their only child, a daughter.

It is hardly surprising that Mozelle Bennet Sawyer should become involved in the earliest years of the National Music Camp, at Interlochen, On the playbill for a June 30, 1929 concert, for example, one finds her name, as violin soloist, right beneath that of Joseph Maddy, conductor and founder of the camp. Interlochen concerts and activities received routine coverage in the Enterprise.

In the edition of July 4, 1940, the newspaper reported on an upcoming concert at the camp at the top of the front page, next to a solitary photograph of two young people. The caption read: “Mozelle Sawyer, young Traverse City violinist seems awed by the complexities of an oboe as explained by Yoshito Uchima of Honolulu, Hawaii. Both youngsters are students at the National Music Camp at Interlochen this year and take part in the regular camp concerts.”

It was the Sawyer’s daughter, Mozelle “Junior.” The young violinist would return to Interlochen for several summers.

The elder Mozelle continued her involvement with Interlochen for decades. Following Dr, Maddy’s death in 1966, she took on a few violin students who, despite his busy schedule, had been his pupils.

In 1982, the Traverse City Musicale celebrated its 50th anniversary. Of the 11 charter members of the organization, only one, Sawyer, was still living. She played her violin for the occasion.

She also made her own occasions. She was known, even in her last years, to call people on the telephone while playing her violin and sing “Happy Birthday” to them.

Sawyer was definitely what one calls a “survivor,” going all the way back to her days at the conservatory in Cincinnati.

“We had given many programs in the various camps for the soldiers,” she wrote. “Right after the Armistice, I went to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, with a handsome Spanish tenor and our accompanist, a girl with brown curly hair who had just joined my sorority, Mu Phi Epsilon. All three of us came down with the ‘1918 flu’ and the other two lost their lives.”

A few years before the Musicale’s 50th anniversary, she played in the new 1,000-seat Corson Auditorium at Interlochen in a benefit concert . Despite some apprehension, she found she hadn’t lost her touch.

“The old doll put on quite a show,” a man was heard to say.

Her violin was one her father had made many years before.

‘Little Orphan Annie’

Former Enterprise publisher Karl Detzer (1891-1987) was a contemporary of Sawyer who grew up in Fort Wayne, Ind. In his autobiography, Myself When Young, he recalled life there as a child up to the age of about 10 or 12. It was there he met a famous Hoosier poet who helped inspire him to become a writer.

“Mr. Riley was the first author I ever met,” he wrote in his book. Riley, in Fort Wayne for a lecture, put young Detzer on his lap.

“Pretending to talk only to me, he launched into “Little Orphan Annie come to our house to stay, to wash the cups and saucers up and brush the crumbs away.”

Meanwhile, (more or less) a little girl was entertaining in Traverse City.

“One evening at the City Opera House I was reciting “Little Orphan Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley. Pointing to Perry Hannah, the ‘Father of Traverse City,’ with his white hair and beard, I said, ‘An the Gobble-uns will get you, if you don’t watch out.’ He never forgot it.”

Sawyer recalled the occasion in her own autobiography, Joy Fills My Heart, about 80 years later.

As a young child, she met others who would later become “local legends.” J.W. Milliken, for example was a local department store owner , the first of three generations of Millikens who would serve in Lansing. He was young Mozelle’s Sunday school teacher.

Curiously enough, although she does give a number of exact dates in her book, Sawyer never wrote when she was born.

The closest indication is a reference to herself “as a child growing up in the 90’s.” Actually, she was born in 1891, the same year as Detzer, and, old as he was when he died, she outlived him.

She died Jan. 31, 1989, at the age of 97.

When she was still living, her birthday was a big occasion for the Mozelle Bennet Sawyer Bridge Club, which continued to play after her death.

A club member was once asked: “And just how old is Mozelle now?”

And the response was: “No one knows exactly – we wouldn’t dare ask her!”