Hazel LaReta Cannon

Hazel LaReta Cannon, eldest of the two children of Ethel Irene Brown and James L. Cannon, was born 3 January 1905 in DeQueen, Sevier County, AR. Her father had been raised within Sevier County. Her mother had come there in 1898 at age eighteen. DeQueen would remain her home throughout childhood. Her birth household consisted of her parents, herself, and younger sister Vae Nadine.

The Cannons lived outside the incorporated area, but were in fact somewhat of a “town” household in terms of lifestyle. In Hazel’s early childhood her father was the editor and publisher of a local daily newspaper, the Bee. While she was in gradeschool, he sold the paper and went into a double career as the local postmaster as well as a broker and representative of an association of Sevier County growers of fruit and fresh vegetables. Within the insular social setting of DeQueen, the Cannons were prominent. Hazel was no doubt imbued with the sense that she should distinguish herself in accordance with her family’s high standing. There was never any doubt as to how she would accomplish that. Her skill in music manifested early and fully. At seventeen, having just graduated DeQueen High School as part of the Class of 1922, Hazel attended Linwood College for Women in St. Charles, MO. This institution was not only eminently suitable for a young lady to get a refined education, the music department was top-notch. Hazel returned to DeQueen and was immediately able to obtain an Arkansas State Music Teachers Credential, and in 1923 at the age of eighteen took on a full slate of students, primarily teaching piano, but also other instruments as the opportunities presented themselves. In addition to her public-school position, she accepted private students as well. She was also the organist at her church -- though she perhaps fulfilled that role without taking money for it.

Because she was based out of her parents’ home, her earnings easily out-paced her routine expenses, leaving her with the wherewithal to ambitiously pursue additional music study and expand her skills and her reputation to a far greater degree than if she had simply stayed in DeQueen as part of its modest performance-and-entertainment scene. Nearly every summer, Hazel furthered the pursuit of her artform in places as far-flung as the Meissner Institute of Music in Milwaukee, WI, the Conn School of Music in Chicago, IL, and in particular, the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She became a distinguished alumna of the latter institution and was brought back a number of times as a soloist for recitals. Early in her time there, in the summer of 1925, she was part of a new and rare event -- a nationwide radio broadcast. During the evening of 28 July 1925, her neighbors back in DeQueen, as well as thousands of other people in various parts of the United States, were able to hear her show off her talent on piano for an hour accompanied by two other women on the violin and the cello, as part of a performance originating from station WLW, Cincinnati.

(Shown at right is Hazel in the midst of the DeQueen High School Class of 1922 girls. This photograph was probably taken early in the school year, i.e. in the autumn of 1921 when Hazel had not yet turned seventeen years old.) By the time Hazel was in her early twenties, she was confronted with the reality that she would have to depend on her teaching income more than she may have anticipated. While music would have been a big part of her life no matter what, she is likely to have assumed that over the long haul she would scale back or even give up her professional career in order to devote the bulk of her attention to being a wife, homemaker, and mother -- and in that role, could count on her husband’s income for the greater part of her financial security. But through the entirety of her twenties and thirties, Hazel did not marry. Moreover, her father passed away in 1926 leaving a load of debt so substantial her mother was left with no cash and no assets other than the family home. By then, all four of Hazel’s grandparents were deceased as well. Hazel proceeded on with no breadwinner figure in her life other than herself, and to top it off, her mother was almost her dependent. Ethel was willing to work and in fact found various ways to generate income -- serving as an insurance agent for example -- but Hazel’s days of having more than enough money to go around became a nostalgic memory.

In the late summer of 1930, Hazel was preparing to begin another academic year of teaching music in DeQueen, as she had done for the previous seven years. Things changed when Graham Smoot, the band instructor and director of music at Menard High School in Menard, TX, abruptly took a job elsewhere, and Hazel was offered the opportunity to fill the vacancy. Hazel accepted, moving to Menard and beginning her new gig on the eighth of September. Her mother came along and would then through a series of further relocations continue to share Hazel’s household for the next fifteen years. DeQueen became a thing of the past. As mentioned in Ethel’s biography, this was a watershed moment in family-history terms, because the community had been home to at least a fraction of the clan of Emma Ann Martin and Cullen Penny Brown for a span of thirty-two years. There was however no question the time had come. Not only was the Menard position an excellent advancement for Hazel careerwise, the abandonment of DeQueen had the advantage that Ethel could sell the house or otherwise turn it into a source of funds.

Hazel kept the job at Menard for at least two years and possibly as many as four. She was popular and well-regarded, and drew praise for her approach. She employed the “Melody Method” a cutting-edge theory of musical instruction that relied more on group teaching than individual attention. She taught not only piano and band, but violin and guitar. In addition to the high school class sessions, she taught private lessons in her own studio in the basement of the so-called Presbyterian Manse. Her accomplishments and the performances she organized received regular attention in Menard’s local newspaper, The Messenger, and in her hometown paper, the Bee.

The Great Depression was a challenging time for school boards and their budgets. Eventually Menard High School was unable to renew Hazel’s contract, ending the relationship by no later than the summer of 1934. The board of the high school twenty miles to the north in Eden, Concho County wanted to hire her, but could not come up with the funding until the summer of 1935 or perhaps even as late as the summer of 1936. In the meantime, Hazel did what she had to. She had the comfort of knowing she was licensed to teach anywhere in the state of Texas; however, she probably did not realize just how many obscure rabbit holes Texas possessed down which she might vanish. She and her mother found themselves spending the midpoint of the decade ensconced in rural Motley County. Located just below the Texas panhandle, Motley County's main distinction nowadays is that most of its territory is taken up by a fragment of the sprawling Matador Ranch, the legacy piece of the estate of the infamous Koch brothers. As of the 2010 census the entire population of the county was only 1200 people. When Hazel and Ethel were there, it was a slightly more vibrant venue, but even then not the sort of place a person would ever describe as crowded.

By no later than September of 1936 Hazel was teaching at Eden High School. Some of the performances she had organized in the early 1930s had been staged not only at Menard High School but at Eden as well, so she was back in familiar surroundings. Even so, she only stayed until 1937. This time it was her choice to transition out of her position. She had craved the chance to do more study, as she had been able to do in the 1920s at the Meissner Institute, the Conn School, and the Cincinnati Conservatory. She had enough money to go back to school for a year -- though it is somewhat of a mystery how this financially-flush set of circumstances occurred. Perhaps she had managed to tuck away some savings specifically with that ambition in mind. Perhaps her aunt Ada, and having no child of her own, chose to subsidize her. Perhaps Hazel was awarded a scholarship. In any case, in September, 1937, Hazel and Ethel moved to Abilene, where Hazel began a year of study at Hardin-Simmons University, a private Baptist institution whose music program was lauded as among the best to be found anywhere in Texas.

Hazel made the most of her Hardin-Simmons experience. She majored in Piano and in Music Theory and at the end of the academic year (i.e. in June, 1938) would receive her baccalaureate. In the meantime, she plunged into activities that included singing in the chorus, playing bass in the orchestra, and helping form the Cowgirl Band under the sponsorship of the campus Ballinger Junior Women’s Club. The band proved very popular, particularly among the freshmen and sophomore students, with never less than thirty-five members in each of its first three years of existence. (Unlike the academic classes, it was genuinely a social organization and included such participant options as xylophone and baton-twirling.) Hazel was the first of member of the club to go on to graduate, which in turn raised the club’s profile and reputation.

Despite having another diploma to wave about, Hazel did not -- at first -- land any better level of employment once she resumed her career. She lingered for a year in Abilene, where she was able to retain her existing private students and where she could take advantage of university connections for short-term earning opportunities, only to have to settle in the summer of 1939 for a modest situation for the 1939-1940 school year in Post, Garza County, TX. The circumstances were comparable to what they had been when she had been based in Motley County, the main difference being which direction one went when setting out from Lubbock, the nearest city. However, her next gig was considerably higher profile. For the first time in her life aside from her summers of study in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cincinnati, Hazel became embedded in something other than a small town or village. The place was Conroe, the seat of Montgomery County, TX, a town in the midst of a surge in population, construction, cultural activities, and money thanks to a local oil boom that had begun in the early 1930s. Moreover, Conroe was along the newly-paved main highway that led right down to Houston. Hazel and her mother were therefore within day-trip range of a cosmopolitan environment. Hazel found Conroe to be a setting in which she could thrive, and where her talents would not be wasted. She began the job in early September, 1940 and would remain where she was for half a decade, her longest stint other than DeQueen.

At some point during the World War II years, Hazel came to know Rathbone Alden Rodgers, better known in general society as R.A. Rodgers. This was one of the big events of Hazel’s life and it is puzzling that her memorabilia completely fails to address the question of where and how they met. Perhaps it was in Conroe -- but no source found thus far places him in that part of Texas at any point in his life, much less the early 1940s. With his parents, he had settled on a farm near San Antonio in the early 1930s. San Antonio seems like where he would have been at the time he and Hazel first encountered one another, but if so, why was she there? The matter is a small mystery. What is certain is that the pair grew fond of one another and were married on New Year’s Eve of the year 1945. Hazel was a wife at last, accomplishing that transition just four days before she turned forty-one years of age. The wedding place was San Angelo (not San Antonio), which suggests that Ethel had made herself scarce while her daughter was in the midst of the courtship, and had sought out the company of her sister Ada, who had relocated to San Angelo a number of years earlier after being widowed.

The date of the nuptials may have been chosen for sentimental reasons -- it was the thirty-ninth wedding anniversary of R.A.’s parents. Born 13 July 1909 in rural Benton County, AR near the small town of Gravette, Rathbone was a son of Parmenio Austin Rodgers, a native of Louisiana, and Frances Rose “Fannie” Barnwell, a native of North Carolina. His father had been much older than his mother, the marriage being his second. R.A. was the youngest child and had only one full sibling along with many older half-siblings. His middle name came from his paternal grandmother, Mary Jane Alden. Much of R.A.’s youth had been spent in Hidalgo County, TX, where his father transformed himself from farmer to bank president. Parmenio had passed away before Hazel had the chance to become his daughter-in-law. That means one of the things Hazel and R.A. had in common was that each of their mothers was a widow. Another thing they shared was that neither of them had been married before. They may well have looked upon one another as their mutual last chance to have a family. The couple do seem to have had the goal of becoming parents in mind. One of the signs is that Hazel had already stopped teaching at the conclusion of the 1944-45 academic year, wrapping up a career that had endured for twenty-two years. It was an obvious case of “clearing the decks” so as to be able to concentrate on childrearing and homemaking. However, Hazel and R.A.’s union was never blessed with offspring.

(In the image above left, Hazel and R.A. pose at their home ranch at Christmastime, 1954. At right is a studio portrait of them from about thirty years later, in their final decade of life.)

The newlyweds settled on a farm in the vicinity of Hondo, Medina County, TX. Their postal address was Dunlay, which was one of the two small communities nearest the farm, the other being Castroville. Dunlay and Castroville are not far west of San Antonio. Their choice kept them near R.A.’s mother, who survived until 1975. Hazel co-managed the farm and honed her housewife skills, but in the long run this was not sufficient to fulfill her, so in 1962, given the absence of any little ones in the home, Hazel became a music teacher again. She did not go back to doing so in the role of a public-school faculty member, though. Instead, her efforts of the 1960s and 1970s (and perhaps of the 1980s, depending on how long she kept it up) were extended to private students from Dunlay, Hondo, and other nearby parts of the Medina Valley. In addition, she served as the treasurer of the Texas Retired Teachers Association, helping to nurture that organization along at a critical juncture.

Finally Hazel and R.A. grew too old to actively farm. However, they continued to reside in Dunlay. Unfortunately by the last dozen or so years of her lifetime, following the deaths of her mother and aunts and even her sister, Hazel was bereft of nearly all of the kinfolk to whom she had cleaved. When R.A. died 20 November 1988 at a hospital in San Antonio, the main family bond that remained was the one Hazel shared with her first cousin Mary Juanita Seay Abel of Elgin, TX. Mary in effect became her heir. As it happened, Mary predeceased Hazel by three-and-a-half months and therefore was not literally her heir, but Hazel’s memorabilia -- which included items from Ada’s memorabilia -- passed down to Mary’s survivors. (Fortunately Mary’s granddaughter had a healthy regard for family history and has gone on to safeguard the trove.) Hazel succumbed 20 December 1990 in Dunlay or in Hondo. Her grave, shared with R.A., is at Redmen Cemetery in DeQueen near those of her parents and grandparents.

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