Back in the 1920s, 97-year-old Martha Tipps was a saxophonist and traveling performer.
This was when the Bainbridge Senior Living resident was just 6 years old.
Tipps and her family of musicians, the “Musical Moores,” traveled together every summer on the Chautauqua circuit from 1922 through 1929.
“It was entertainment for people who didn’t have entertainment,” she said.
In the late 1800s, in the time before radio was a common commodity, the Chautauqua circuit began as an educational and cultural movement.
It was a means of entertaining and educating people who lived in small towns and had little contact with neighboring communities.
Speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers and preachers traveled from town-to-town in almost every state west of the Mississippi to host events. It brought in such intellectuals as William Jennings Bryan and Russell Conwell.
Tipps on her soprano saxophone with her 3-year-old brother, Chet — the star of the show — on the trap drum, her two older brothers on the trumpet and saxophone and her parents on the piano and trombone, traveled from their home in Gardner, Kan. throughout the Midwest.
“We all dressed up very, very nice,” Tipps said. “It was a high class type of entertainment. It wasn’t an ordinary show.”
Her brother, Chet, dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy costume, and was listed by Ripley’s Believe It or Not as the world’s smallest trap drummer for years. As the youngest family band member he stirred headlines, and the family billed him as 5 years old for several years.
It was the family’s summer adventure every year, until 1929, when the Great Depression hit.
A year later, Tipps ended her saxophone career.
Around the same time that the Chautauqua faded out for the family and most of the U.S., Tipps swapped out her bulky woodwind for a violin.
A true musician, she continued to play the string instrument for 35 years with symphony orchestras.
Tipps will make a public trip down Memory Lane again on Friday, Aug. 9, when she shares her story traveling with the “Musical Moores” and her life on the circuit at the Madison Avenue House. Her talk begins at 3:30 p.m.
