For nearly a century, music, family and education have been constant streams running through the life of Mary Bounds.
Now 98, the still-talented musician looked back on a life in South Jersey and Moorestown filled with jazz, racial tensions, and most importantly, her family.
This past St. Patrick’s Day, Mary thrilled Burlington County freeholders and visitors of the county Office on Aging and Nutrition at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Moorestown, where Mary was the church organist for 40 years, as she played piano pieces for a stunned crowd, including Freeholder Mary Ann O’Brien and County Office on Aging Director Jeanne Borkowski.
Music has been a constant in Bounds’ life.
Born in 1913 in North Cape May, Mary said she remembered her father purchasing the family an old Victrola when she was a young girl.
Every single Friday after receiving his paycheck, her father would visit a local music store and purchase several records for the family.
Old jazz musicians, operas, even comedy — Mary said her family would laugh uproariously when they listened to Burt Williams, a popular late-19th and early-20th comedian and vaudevillian — were their favorites and her father would bring them home each week and play them for Mary and her brothers and sisters.
“We had stacks and stacks of records. As he came home from his job, he would stop at Dowell’s. We’d all say, ‘Pop, what did you bring this time?’” Mary said. “When radios were invented, every Saturday afternoon he would have off from work and I remember listening to all those old tenor singers with him.”
Growing up in Cape May, Mary said her household was always filled with music, but education was also a priority for all of her brothers and sisters. When her brother quit the piano, Mary said she asked her mother if she could take lessons instead of him.
Lessons back then were only 50-cents, she said, but it was still enough that her mother didn’t want to be burned twice by one of her children wasting money by quitting after only a few tries.
“I would walk up there to my lessons and we had a beautiful relationship — myself and my piano. That’s where I got my classical foundation. He was using literature from Theodore Presser. I went through the six books and I got to have a recital of my own. My parents were so proud when I had that church recital. My father decorated the church; we had beautiful palms in great big tubs. I had that recital, and from then on, music always moved me,” she said. “My teacher wanted me to come with him to make music my career, but I always wanted to be a schoolteacher. I said, no, I don’t want to go any further. I didn’t stop playing though. When I was about 12, the organist taught me the foundations of a pipe organ. I became an organist for our church.”
It was a strange time to be growing up in America, Mary said. Even in New Jersey, racial tensions were high, and she attended a segregated school that was located behind an all-white Cape May school.
Later on in her life, she would go on to teach at a segregated school behind the old Cape May High School. She’s the last surviving teacher from that facility, she said.
Growing up during segregation and experiencing the equal rights movement firsthand, Mary said she always paid attention to the movement and related more closely to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. than she did those of Malcolm X.
She was supportive of the NAACP when it was developed — and those in the equal rights movement — but she wasn’t actively involved with either.
“We all had to deal with segregation back then, but then again, we learned how to make due. We figured out how to cope with that, how to deal with racial hatred, that sort of thing. It gave us a background that most of us share, most of my peers in our 80s and 90s. We learned how to deal with it all. We went to the back of the bus; we drank at the ‘colored’ water fountains. We learned how to deal,” she said. “There were those who were very rebellious and those of us that accepted it as a fact of life. It drew us closer together.”
She can still remember, to this day, the first time she saw a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was a Halloween parade down the streets of Cape May, Mary said, and she saw a member of the group wearing the historic white uniform and white hat.
There was a group in Cumberland County at the time, she said, in Millville, and they came down to march in the parade.
“I can remember as a child that I was about 5 or 6 years old. That was in the era when the Ku Klux Klan arose. I can remember my mother and father talking about lynchings,” she said. “One Halloween, they had a parade in Cape May and we went to watch. Here came four or five men on horseback with their KKK regalia on, and as a child, I thought that was their Halloween costume. They had a Klan in Cumberland County; they came down from Millville and rode in the parade. It didn’t occur to me what it was; I thought it was their Halloween costume. We accepted this stuff.”
Through her education, Mary said she knew that she wanted to have a career in teaching children. After graduating from Cape May High School in 1929, she enrolled in Glassboro College — now Rowan University — for a three-year teaching program, the first of its kind offered at the college.
After graduating, Mary said the pickings were slim for black teachers.
“I graduated in 1932. From then on, I was a schoolteacher and I specialized in kindergarten and primary. I’ve had some extremely interesting teaching experiences. At that time, black schools were segregated. Those of us who came out of the New Jersey teachers’ colleges — they were called normal schools — found it was very hard for us to get a teaching job in New Jersey because those black teachers, they stayed on the job until they died. That might not sound not too wonderful, but it was true,” she said.
Unable to find a job in New Jersey, Mary moved to North Carolina where she quickly found a job teaching kindergarten for three years. However, when Glassboro decided to offer a four-year program to receive a bachelor’s degree in education, she moved back to New Jersey.
Just a few months before school started, Mary said her old high school principal — who had since become a superintendent in Cape May — contacted her father to see how she was doing. When her father said she was back in town, the superintendent told him the school’s kindergarten teacher had died and the job was hers if she wanted it.
“The superintendent of the school said you take the job and you work out the required credits. There was a lot of extension work and summer school. We worked it our through extensions and I took Saturday classes and summer school to get my degree,” she said. “But that’s how I ended up teaching down there in Cape May in the segregated schools, pre-first, first- and second-grades.”
The school, on Franklin Street in Cape May, is long gone now, Mary said.
While she was working, the world was engulfed in battle, as World War II broke out during her early career. One nice thing that came out of the war, she said, was meeting her future husband, Charles A. Bound.
Charles, a native of Moorestown Township, and Mary, were quickly married in 1941. That’s when her life’s chapter in Moorestown began.
“We married for two reasons. I married him because there weren’t a lot of fellas around and he married me because he thought it would prolong his draft status. He was finally enlisted, though, and I married him. After that, we hurried up and he had the first child waiting for him when he came back,” she said. “I retired from Cape May and came up to Moorestown with him. We were married in 1941. I really became a permanent Moorestown citizen in 1951. After the war, my husband was stationed at Ft. Wayne, Ind., at Bare Field. That was the Air Force. We stayed out there and raised a family. I had four children. On his job, we had a two-bedroom apartment and we had acquired four kids. We needed more room and that’s why we moved to Moorestown.”
Charles began a career at RCA Victor, and Mary took some time off to raise her young children. In 1955, she was hired by the Mt. Laurel School District, where she taught until 1984.
She was forced to retire when she turned 70, as the state had a rule that all teachers had to retire by that age, Bound said.
The next year the state repealed the law and Mary said she may have taught even longer if they had done if the year before.
Charles died in 2002 after 61 years of marriage, Mary said.
Despite his roots in the township, Mary didn’t move back to Cape May when he died. She chose to stay in the family “homestead” where she still lives today with just her grandson.
“They were 61 very challenging years. There have been some very high points, and some very low points. It’s all been challenging, but never a dull moment. I raised four children who have been very successful. Two of them have law degrees, the other two had teaching degrees. All of them have been college graduates. They have been the pride of my life,” Mary said. “Like anyone else in life, there were high points and low points. Some good, some bad. We came up through the great depression and that background has led a lot of us who are in our 80s and 90s, it has let us find out how to deal with today’s times. We learned how to eek out and to make due. It made us who we are.”
So today, Mary spends most her time in the same Moorestown home she has lived in since the 1950s, visiting with family, talking to her grandson and, of course, listening to and playing her music.
Though her hands hurt more these days and have trouble handling a phone, Bounds said when she sits at a piano, the pain melts away and she can still play an orchestra-worthy piece of music.
“I have become very shaky in my hands. Sometimes, I have difficulty with a cell phone. It wriggles away in my hands,” Bounds said after accidentally hanging up during this interview. “The funny thing is, though, when I put my hands on the piano keys, I feel just fine.”
Her mother can rest easily knowing that those 50-cent piano lessons certainly didn’t go to waste.
