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MARY WEST: I remember when I was a little girl and went to the theater, and I saw a violinist playing in the pit of the orchestra. And when I was five years old, I just ran down in front of him and watched him play. And I wouldn't move. Didn't watch the stage, just watched the violinist. And so I just loved the violin and I begged for a violin.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Did your grandparents and your mother make sure that you had those kinds of cultural opportunities? I'm trying to figure out how you discovered music.

MARY WEST: Well, I remember that New Orleans was famous for the opera companies, French opera. And we went regularly to the opera, we went regularly to the theater.

And so we had opportunities to hear many great violinists. I heard Fritz Kreisler, Erika Morini. Anybody that came to New Orleans, we were always there on the front row listening to the music and loving it. And the violinist, Erika Morini, was my role model, and she was a very famous violinist in that days, the world's greatest woman violinist.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Do you think a lot of children your age around that period were like you, falling in love with classical music? What was it about going to hear that music that captivated you so?

MARY WEST: Well, it's hard to explain. It just hit me because I was so young. I was only five or six when I began to really be crazy about music and begged for the violin. I didn't get one until I was 7 because they gave me a ukulele instead.

So instead of playing the ukulele, you strumming away at it, I tried to put it under my chin and make a little stick and try to play it like a violin. And so that was the first thing.

And then my family figured out that they better get me a violin. They bought me a violin that was much too big. It was a full size violin, and I was just a little girl. And I was frustrated because I couldn't really hold it.

So finally, my grandfather decided to buy me a 3/4 size violin, which I started on. And after I played violin for about a year, my sister really wanted to study. And so my grandfather didn't want two violinists in the family. So he insisted that she just continue with piano.

But we secretly went up in the attic and I taught her the violin, everything I knew. And I'd give her a lesson. And finally one day she came down and played for my grandfather. And he was just-- he had to let her take lessons.

CHRIS ROBERTS: He must have been floored.

MARY WEST: Yeah, he was. She was very good, too. She actually was more talented than I was.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Well, you were a good teacher. I guess you began your teaching career at the age of, what, six years old?

MARY WEST: About seven.

CHRIS ROBERTS: When you started playing the violin, did you realize immediately that you had an innate talent?

MARY WEST: No, no, I didn't realize I had a talent. I just loved to play. And I was very ambitious and always wanted to play harder music. And well, I listened to great music all the time. We had a Victrola and we not only listened to violin records. We listened to singers a lot. We listened to Caruso in those days. And my grandfather loved opera, so we listened to opera records.

So it was a general music education more than just violin. And I loved piano, too, so it was-- but in those days, the music teacher came to the house. And we had a very sweet, lovely music teacher, a French lady that had gone to Paris Conservatory and she was really a pianist.

But she taught us the violin, she taught violin lessons, too. And she came every week, and it was a real treat because she'd stay like three hours or something. Lots of time in those days.

CHRIS ROBERTS: A music teacher who does house calls.

MARY WEST: Yeah, house calls. Exactly. Yeah.

CHRIS ROBERTS: It's not often that I get to have a conversation with someone who's 86 years old and who grew up in a time totally foreign to me. You grew up in-- you were born in 1909. So therefore, you spent your formative years in the 1920s studying music and living your life. I wanted to ask you, what was the country like back then? Was it a different place than it is now? Obviously, it was, but how?

MARY WEST: It was very, very different because it was a small world. Actually, in our neighborhood, we just saw the kids and we played a little bit in the neighborhood, but we didn't know too much about the outside world. That was the whole thing, except school. And no television, that's the difference, and no radio. So we had to make our own fun.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Do you think you were better for it?

MARY WEST: Oh, I don't know. It's hard to say. I know it was more conducive to working hard because the present day generation has too many interests and too many diversions, I think.

My sister and I were very fortunate. When I was 12 years old, we got a scholarship to go to Chicago and study with a very, very famous teacher. But it was a master class and it was for 10 weeks, and my sister and I were the only children in the class.

And his name was Otakar Sevcik. He was a great Czechoslovakian teacher. He had written many, many, many method books. I use his books today, and every violin teacher recognizes that name, Sevcik.

So we had 10 lessons with him with scholarships, and then we went on to Kansas City conservatory of Music when I was very young. Actually, graduated from the conservatory at the time I should have been graduating from high school. Meanwhile, I was taking high school in the summertime. So then we went on to New York after that.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Were your mother and your grandparents worried about all the time that you were spending on music, or were they gung ho behind you? I guess the stereotype is that behind every prodigy is a pair of hungry parents.

MARY WEST: That wasn't true of my parents. They, in fact, used to say, go out and play. We were motivated from within, and they had absolutely no ambitions for us, ambition for us to be concert artists or anything. They just knew that we wanted to play and enjoyed the music.

And it wasn't like present day either, where the parents are really gung ho about it. As a matter of fact, my grandfather was sort of against playing in public. He just wanted us to play for cultural reasons, but we were very ambitious. It was really self-motivated.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Where did that ambition come from?

MARY WEST: I think from hearing these great violinists and great music, and even from the idea that we went to the theater a lot. I think that was part of it.

We were exposed a lot to cultural things. Even though we didn't have a lot of friends, but my family took us regularly to the theater. They took us to the movies too, but mostly concerts and opera and stuff.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Is that the key to a successful musician, having a family that exposes them to as many different cultural opportunities as possible?

MARY WEST: I really believe that. I actually don't believe in pushing people too hard when they're children. I think they should practice, and competitions are good just for experience. I think competitions should only be to improve your playing, not necessarily to win, or to feel that you have to win and feel terribly disappointed if you don't.

And actually, we didn't play in many competitions. My sister and I were about the only-- we were the only violinists that I knew, and we didn't have any friends that played violin at all. And one neighbor did start taking violin lessons. But usually, you have a lot of people playing in your community, but we didn't.

CHRIS ROBERTS: After you graduated from the Kansas City Conservatory, you enrolled in Juilliard.

MARY WEST: I went to Juilliard during the depression, and I actually we couldn't go full time. We were really part-time students there because my sister and I both had to work to make a living then. We were very poor at that time. And I worked in a department store as a sales girl part of the time, and part of the time just playing for our meals.

Actually, my sister and I played in a club called the Town Hall Club. It was a very, very nice restaurant in New York, and we got $15 a week and our food in those days. And that was in 1930s during the depression.