Pioneer music teacher Garrett dies

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, Nov. 23, 2001 | 9:46 a.m.

Madelaine E. Garrett, who taught music to Boulder City's first two generations of schoolchildren and carried an egg-timer in her purse to limit her husband's speeches, died Tuesday at Boulder City Hospital. She was 92.

She suffered a heart attack and stroke last week while sleeping at her Avenue K home, friends said. She was hospitalized, but never regained consciousness.

Services at Faith Christian Church in Boulder City, a church she helped establish, will be 2 p.m. Saturday.

Garrett leaves a legacy of a school system devoted to music and cultural arts in a town that had very little of either before her arrival from South Dakota in 1942.

Garrett stopped giving music lessons in recent years as her own playing slowed. She gave away her home grand piano and then a pipe organ. But until her last days, church groups still came by her home to consult her about programming, and a small circle of friends came by for her immaculate, late afternoon luncheons and delicate wit.

"You never, never were with Madelaine when there wasn't laughter," Laura Kelly Smith, a longtime friend and former student, said. "She wasn't a joke-teller and she wasn't a story-teller. But she could just remind you of something, of something you liked."

Garrett arrived in Boulder City as "Miss Elwell," a young, vibrant teacher of freshman high school English, able to make the Greek and Roman gods of mythology come alive for students normally distracted by ongoing news of World War II.

She taught in one of four temporary classrooms installed that year in front of the high school -- the same brick building that now serves as town hall offices.

The classrooms were built to accommodate the hundreds of families moving to Southern Nevada to find work at the federal magnesium processing plants being built in Henderson as part of the war effort.

After she married prominent businessman Elton Garrett in 1944 -- a disheveled, but charismatic public figure next to her more reserved elegance -- she demonstrated an ability to move gracefully through a smaller, more closely knit Boulder City than exists today. It was also a town more fractured by cliques.

At that time, when Boulder City was still run by the federal government, social circles were defined by work, Dennis McBride, a local historian said. The employees of the Bureau of Reclamation socialized mostly with their own set, as did employees of the Bureau of Mines and the civilians who lived in private housing and worked in Las Vegas.

Elton Garrett, who died in 1992, helped organize many of the local civic clubs that bridged some of those divides. He was a newspaper reporter, an educator and a man given to long, impromptu speeches. It was that habit that led Madelaine, who was less comfortable in the spotlight, to carry what became her famous egg timer.

"It would go off and she would say, 'All right, Elton, sit down,' " McBride said. "She gave him a minute or two."

After a couple of years of marriage, Madelaine Garrett, who never had children, returned to the local school and taught for 27 years. She organized and became director of the school's marching band, dance band, an orchestra, boys and girls glee clubs, and the madrigal singers. Many of those groups went on to win local and regional awards.

The groups practiced before school, so it was not unusual to see Garrett before 6 a.m., out walking her dog before heading off to school.

She also gave private piano lessons after school for $1 an hour at the couple's first home, a duplex at the corner of Wyoming Street and Avenue F. She taught classical music at a grand piano that took up half of the living room.

In the front yard an arbor of seedless grapes -- a novelty for the time -- attracted school kids who knew they could "snip off a snippet" as long as they left some for the next passerby, Smith said.

Garrett helped start Boulder City Little Theater in the early 1940s, writing music, songs and singing and acting in performances. For a while the company performed the only live theater available in Southern Nevada. It survived into the early 1980s, known in later years as the Boulder First Nighters.

The Elton and Madelaine Garrett Middle School was named after the couple in 1990.

Madelaine also established a scholarship to allow several promising music students to attend summer camp each year. She was a member of the Order of Eastern Star, a woman's group of the Masons.

"She was one of our stalwart citizens," Mayor Bob Ferraro said. "She lived and breathed Boulder City."

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