Publication of Professor Vincent Lenti’s three-volume history of the Eastman School of Music, together with so much sustained activity throughout the 2021-22 centennial year, turned the Eastman School community’s attention to the illustrious aspects of the institution’s history.  The Eastman School’s record of education, achievement, and trendsetting amply speaks for itself, and we can confidently expect that the industrious work and the far-reaching vision of administrators, faculty members, and students will carry forward that legacy indefinitely.  Along the way throughout the past century, there have been certain other moments, less salubrious in nature and not entirely musical, that are less well remembered.  Would anyone believe that there had once been a plot to dynamite the Eastman School of Music?  Yes, incredibly enough, the history of the Eastman School includes even that!  Perhaps the real zinger in the story is that the two individuals held responsible were an Eastman School alumna and an enrolled Eastman student.  The extant documentation that I cite herein consists of local press reporting, now preserved in two scrapbooks in the Sibley Music Library.

Seventy-four years ago this week, no less than a plot to dynamite the Eastman School was discovered and thwarted by local law enforcement officials. The story broke in the Rochester press on October 1^st, 1960, the day after the seizure of several hundred pounds of dynamite by the Rochester police. Announcement of the discovery and seizure was accompanied by detailed reporting on the individual responsible, a 24-year-old woman who was a violinist member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and a public school music graduate of the Eastman School of Music. While a preliminary psychiatric investigation did not point to insanity, some of the woman’s statements were conflicting; moreover, she spoke of having received letters threatening injury to herself if she did not carry out the plot against the Eastman School. (It was reported that the police found no such letters.)  She had recruited a younger woman, who was at that time enrolled at Eastman, to assist her in the plot. The press reported that one year earlier, the two had broken into the Eastman School office of Flora Burton, Dean of Students (served in that capacity 1946-72).  Somewhat surprisingly, how the Eastman School community reacted to the news is not mentioned in any of the press reportage, but Eastman School Director Dr. Howard Hanson, for his part, was cited to the effect that he had found the young woman a pleasant person in his admittedly brief contacts with her.

As the ensuing weeks passed, the Rochester press reported on the investigation and continuing developments.  The stories were printed in both the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle  and the Rochester Times-Union; uploaded here are all of the articles that are preserved at the Sibley Music Library.  The SML sequence comes to an end with the report that the two young women had pleaded guilty to the charges; thereafter, the SML did not retain any further reporting of the story. Further research elsewhere would complete the documentary record, but perhaps it’s as well to stop at this point.  Altogether, this story is as unfortunate as it is sensational, suggesting that not all was well in the lives of two young people who had made such decisions as they did.  The escapade even found its way into official documentation of the United States Government.  In that the foiled plot had been reported in broadcast news, it was given permanent record in a Senate subcommittee report which carried the following summary:  “Police in Rochester, N.Y. have arrested two young women musicians on charges of plotting to blow up the famed Eastman School of Music ….Police said the seized 125 sticks of dynamite from the girls’ apartment.”^[1]

Ultimately, though, we can draw the favorable conclusion all was well that ended well.  Nobody was harmed; no damage was done to property; and time passed.  The younger of the two women made a successful career for herself, completing her studies and earning a masters degree and then joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra, becoming only the third woman member of that orchestra.  She retired from the BSO after 38 years’ service and has recently published her memoirs.  The other young woman, the instigator of the plot, was clearly a poised individual and a talented performer. A public school major (which today would be in the Department of Music Teaching and Learning) with the violin as her principal instrument, she had played second violin in the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra I under conductor Dr. Paul White, and then, following her graduation from Eastman, was appointed to the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Theodore Bloomfield as a member of the second violin section.  One hopes that she, too, was able to move on and to achieve peace and success.  The story of the foiled dynamite plot is now largely forgotten, a footnote incident in the otherwise highly illustrious history of the Eastman School of Music.