SUPPORTING THE ARTS IS PERSONAL FOR LOCAL PHILANTHROPIST JUDY MORGAN,
Supporting culture is personal for local philanthropist
For Judy Morgan, giving to the arts is personal, in some sense, rooted in what she learned growing up in Amarillo and as an adult here in Texarkana.
If you’re in touch with the local arts scene, chances are strong that something you’ve seen, enjoyed or even participated in has been in some way connected to Morgan, whose philanthropy and arts organizational abilities have left a lasting mark in Texarkana.
A C.E. Palmer Award winner and former member of the Texas A&M University System’s Board of Regents, Morgan’s love for the arts started young. You may not know it, but at one time in her younger years she played the bassoon.
While here in Texarkana, she took piano lessons from the late James Herrin, a music teacher at Texarkana College. That experience figures largely in her life, so much so she’s supported, for a decade, the James Herrin Piano Festival at TC, which this November brought an Arkansas-based piano duo, Drs. Hee-Kyung Juhn and Lei Cai, to town to perform and teach.
But the piano has been with her since she was a youngster. “My aunt was a piano teacher, and I grew up by her side and started taking piano lessons and played in the Amarillo Symphony in high school,” Morgan recalled.
And if you know the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council, which has its fingers in all sorts of local arts endeavors, in Morgan you have one of its co-founders, tasked with the job decades ago when she was involved with the Junior League of Texarkana.
Morgan describes fortuitous events like these as just a “moment in time” where it all came together.
Back in the late 1970s, she and another Junior Leaguer were tasked with heading to Beaumont, Texas, to study arts councils. Armed with knowledge they gained, they asked the Junior League for seed money, $50,000 a year for the first two years, to get TRAHC up and running with a good group of people to serve on the first board, she recalled.
“We had, for the first couple years, two or three programs a year,” Morgan remembers. That included one program at the old Pine Street School auditorium, she recalls, and they brought a Dallas Ballet version of “The Nutcracker” to Texarkana College’s old auditorium, too.
“We hadn’t sold enough tickets to cover our expenses and we had a panic,” Morgan remembers of that ballet show. But the day of the show, a Sunday, turned out to have gorgeous weather. People flocked to see it. But still, they didn’t yet have their own building, seen as a key to arts council success, so they struggled.
All that changed with renovations made by the city to the old Saenger Theatre building downtown. The Perot Theatre became the arts council’s home with TRAHC acting as managers ever since. It was a stroke of good fortune.
“You can imagine. We moved into our new offices and then we had a place to have performances,” Morgan said. She and others also got involved in starting Women for the Arts, a women’s group to support TRAHC.
She looks back fondly on an early WFA fundraiser where they did all the work themselves. The venue didn’t even come with a kitchen, she says. They cooked and brought the food (and refrigerators) to the gala.
“Our first gala that we had has been the most successful one,” Morgan recalled. About 700 people attended, and the gala brought in about $86,000, she said. Expenses were close to nothing, so that money pretty much all went to TRAHC. A women’s support group was key, a lesson Morgan later put into practice by forming Women for Texas A&M University-Texarkana.
“An organization, it’s helpful to have women to further your cause, to be your ambassadors, to carry the word out and be a support group financially to help you raise funds,” said Morgan, who as a teen played her bassoon for the Amarillo Symphony and also attended a couple summers of music camp in Interlochen, Mich., with it (where she saw famous pianist Van Cliburn play).
Although she didn’t play that bassoon ever again, an appreciation for the symphony and classical music has always remained.
Morgan’s business background is rooted in Amarillo, where the family business was born: Jack B. Kelley Enterprises Inc., which is a cryogenic gas trailer company. It all started with helium, actually. A painting in her home office depicts her father and those gas trailers, and it stands as a testament to his hard work and his vision in building the company. These values she also put into practice.
Morgan has also been involved in the community in all sorts of other ways, not just the arts, including with the Texarkana Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, Sustainers of the Junior League of Texarkana, Wadley Regional Medical Center Foundation Board and St. James Day School Board of Directors.
The Junior League also backed the Texarkana Symphony Orchestra with $100,000, although Morgan wasn’t sure it would succeed. She voted for
it, though. She thought a local “feeder” like an existing orchestra program in the schools was needed to make it work. But as it turned out, the orchestra came and local youth music then grew.
“I thought that was so fabulous,” said Morgan, who’s on the search committee for the new TSO artistic director and conductor. She said applicants have already shown interest. She’s proud of what the TSO has accomplished.
“I don’t know many people know: we have a very good orchestra here, a very good orchestra,” Morgan said.
Her connection to Herrin inspired her to support the Texarkana College music department’s festival named in his honor. Each year, it brings an accomplished pianist (or, as was the case this year, pianists) to town. The idea is to see a great performance, learn about the piano and give students a chance to compete.
“He passed away while I was taking piano from him,” Morgan recalled of Herrin. “When Mary Scott (Goode) called me to say would I start sponsoring this piano competition in his name, I was thrilled to do it.”
She recalls that Herrin loved music and inspired that feeling in students. “He made me want to practice,” said Morgan, who was in her early 40s when she studied under him. For an adult to be inspired to devote time to practicing, that says something, she believes.
And of the Herrin competition winners, “The level of performance has just increased dynamically year after year,” she said while playing a video of this year’s winning performance by Natalio Castaneda, pride and respect in her voice.
She has shared her love for the piano in other ways as well. She and Remica Gray, a TSO founder, purchased a grand piano and donated it to Texas A&M University-Texarkana. It’s used in performances, and sometimes students play it during lunch.
At her Texas-side home, Morgan often hosts the guest artists for the TSO concerts and the Herrin Piano Festival, which provides quite a treat. She’s sponsored TSO concerts, and guest artists stay in her pool house.
“I get to hear them practice,” Morgan said. Scott Kirby, who plays Scott Joplin music, and the cellist Zuill Bailey are among her favorite visitors. Musicians have enjoyed late-night conversations at her patio.
“It’s just fun to get to know these people personally,” Morgan said, noting that it’s thrilling to have seen organizations like the TSO and TRAHC succeed on their own in the years since they were founded.
“It’s not me, but it was nice to be there on the ground floor,” she said. She compares it to seeing one’s children go off to college and then fare well in life. At TRAHC, she’s seen their good fortune with excellent executive directors, she says.
On a personal note, the most satisfying event she’s participated in here, Morgan remembers, was the Perot Theatre dedication ceremony, which featured Ross Perot and the Dallas Symphony performing patriotic music. It was an honor to be on that stage, for one thing, but she also got to hear how acoustics sounded in the renovated Perot.
The Perot had been a theater there before, of course, but she’s not sure if a symphony ever held a concert in the space. What she heard that day was music to her ears and, surely, the ears of others. As it has been in the years since then.
“It was a fabulous sound that day,” Morgan said.