When Elouise Mattox recalls the Central Oregon Symphony (COS), of fifty years ago, it’s hard to believe that she’s talking about the beginnings of that 65-piece orchestra we have today. Elouise remembers, as a young recent University of Oregon graduate, arriving in Bend and running into Ed Kammerer in the grocery store. She and Ed had both played in the Corvallis High School Band, Elouise on the flute and Ed on the French horn.
Ed had just been hired by COCC to teach and direct the newly formed symphony and was looking for musicians. So Elouise said she’d dig out her flute and give it a try. Then she asked Ed, “Do you need a trumpet? My husband Charles plays.”
Practices were held once a week in the Bend High School band room, convenient for Elouise who was teaching history and civics there. She recalls that the music was fairly simple, that there was a real shortage of strings, and that everyone was quite an amateur. “It was more of an opportunity for musicians to play than it was for an audience to be entertained. There were maybe just twenty of us.”
The next year, 1970, Jerry Yahna took over as director and wanted to raise the caliber of both the music and the musicians. “The music required skill beyond our level.” So the tenure of Elouise and Charles with the symphony was short lived.
Growing up, Elouise’s exposure to classical music was limited to the San Francisco radio station that her Park Ranger father and mother listened to in their remote cabin at Crater Lake National Park. When they relocated to Joseph, the young Elouise took piano and flute lessons and relied on trips with her mother to LaGrande to expand her classical listening.
Though her time with the symphony was short, her love of classical music continues, and you will find Elouise either attending or ushering at COS concerts, and volunteering, of course, for the fiftieth anniversary celebration.
Perhaps Elouise and Chuck’s greatest contribution to music in Central Oregon has been sharing with us the brilliant vocal performances of their daughter, Sarah.