Young Malcolm and the Violin

Malcolm Hendricks Merrill was born 28 June 1903 in Richmond, Utah to (Louis) Edgar & Clara Hendricks Merrill.

Malcolm Hendricks Merrill, 1903.

He was the 5th of 9 children: (Edgar) Lionel, Orval, Norma, (Clarissa) Audene, Malcolm, Vernor & Virgil (boy & girl twins who both died as infants), Thais and (Clara) Theola Merrill. Below is a picture taken about 1910 with Malcolm and three of his siblings.

Audene Clarissa Merrill (left), Malcolm Hendricks Merrill, Norma Merrill (right),
Thais Abia Merrill (front). Photo taken about 1911.

Edgar & Clara Merrill lived in this brick home in Richmond at the time. (I have driven by the house as recently as 2014).

The house of L. Edgar & Clara Merrill in Richmond, Utah, where Malcolm Hendricks Merrill was born.
(Taken in 1953 by Malcolm Merrill and labeled "House in which I was born")

Clara (Hendricks) & Edgar Merrill, in front of their brick house in Richmond, Utah.

In a recording made by Robert E. Wilson around 1978, Malcolm told about his first day of school.

I went to grammar school then in this little town of Richmond, Utah. In those days we didn’t have kindergarten so we started school when we were six years old. So when I was just about the size of Sharon, I was six years old, and I was skinny (like you are now), and I went dashing off to my first day of school in this little town. We had what seemed to me then to be a great big brick school building. Actually, it wasn’t so big, but it had 8 rooms, one room for each of the 8 grades of the kids who went to that school. In those days when we went to school, we’d go at 9 in the morning and then we’d have recess at 10:15, in which all of the children would get out in the yard and play games and have a good time for about 15 minutes. But I thought it was lunchtime! After I’d been to school a whole hour and a half, I was hungry, so I wanted to have some lunch. So I went dashing off home—and our home was only a half a block away, so I could get home in a hurry. When I got home, my mother asked me, “What are you doing home so soon? School isn’t out yet.” “Well, they let us all out, and everybody went out into the yard,” I said. And she said, “No, that’s just recess. That’s just the time you get out to play.” So then I had to go back to school for the rest of the morning. That was my first day in the first grade in the red brick school in the little town of Richmond, Utah. [Robert: You missed recess?] Oh, I got my exercise all right, just running home and back! But I didn’t get a sandwich when I got home. She just told me to go back to school.

Malcolm was very bright. He was the valedictorian of his grammar school, high school and college. Below are two photos of his 8th grade graduation, each followed by a close-up.

Richmond, Utah 8th grade graduating class. (Malcolm H. Merrill, 3rd from right in front row)

Malcolm Hendricks Merrill, 8th grade graduation. 

Malcolm said, "I was the valedictorian of the eighth grade, and I remember that my mother was so proud, and she took me up to J.C. Penny’s and bought me a new suit, and it was a green suit. My first long pants suit with a vest. And I wore this new green suit with this vest when I gave my graduation speech."

Malcolm Hendricks Merrill. 8th grade graduation.

Malcolm Hendricks Merrill, 8th grade graduation.

Malcolm had fun playing games in his small town growing up. He said they had fun playing "Run, sheep run!" and "kick the can". He also told the following.

This lot we had...was big enough that we could lay out a diamond—not a full sized diamond, but big enough for the softball sort of thing. And we had just wonderful games out there playing softball with the neighborhood kids. There were a dozen or fifteen of us around there and we’d all get together and have these wonderful times.

We would play kickball, which was a variation I guess of rugby, where everybody on one side would line up on one end of the field and everybody on the other side would line up on the other side, and then the one side would kick the ball, and try to get it over the other side’s goal line, with all the kids scrambling every which way to try to get into the act. 

So we had a lot of fun in this rural community.

Playing the Violin

When Malcolm was a boy, he had a unique opportunity to learn to play the violin. Mark Merrill recorded Thelma telling about how this happened in his recordings of Pearls from the Past, which Beth (Partridge) Merrill was kind enough to type up. When asked about Malcolm playing the violin, Thelma said the following.

Ahhh-I’m glad you remember Grandpa and that he played the violin.  Grandpa had a wonderful mother, Clara Hendricks Merrill.  She was always on his side.  I remember Edgar said to her one time – how were you different when you carried Malcolm, because he seems so different from the other children.  She couldn’t remember, of course.  So she saw to it that he had all kinds of advantages and she used to take in boarders so that she’d have the money so that the kids could go to school and one of the boarders was a violinist.  So she had him give Malcolm violin lessons instead of paying board, and that’s how he got interested in it.  And so of course he was a very good violinist.  (He was good in everything he did!)  He was a concert violinist at the university orchestra and so that’s how good he was.  You know what the concertmaster is. He is the one who sets the down bow and everyone has to follow him.  I think he used to scold me for telling that.

Apparently the young man who taught Malcolm the violin was Leroy Robertson. Leroy went on to become the chairman of the Music Department at BYU among other things. Our current LDS hymnal has 8 hymns for which he wrote the music, including "Upon the Cross of Calvary" and "We Love Thy House, Oh God". He also wrote the words for one of these, "On This Day of Joy and Gladness."

One other interesting connection with Leroy Robertson was that our daughter Kelsi took violin lessons from Elizabeth Burton, who had had Leroy Robertson as her professor and dean of the Music Department in California. She was quite surprised when I mentioned to her who my grandfather had learned the violin from!

Malcolm also told about playing in the orchestra of his grammar school.

We had a school orchestra and school band under Mr. Omanson. He was a violinist and musician who got his training in music while he was on a mission in Denmark. As a side issue, he said that his mission president told him that he should get as much as he could out of his mission, and allowed him to take music lessons and study music while he was there. Well anyway, he organized this school orchestra and school band in our grade school, and most of the way through grade school I was taking violin lessons from him and playing in this school orchestra. And then he organized the band, and I played a valve trombone in the school band. And we’d play in either the orchestra or the band (as I remember it was mostly the orchestra) that would play for the kids to march into class, and then dash to the place where the orchestra would assemble and play it again for the kids to march out of the building as they went home to lunch and as they came back into school after lunch and as they went home in the evening. So we played in the orchestra several times a day one way or the other.

In addition to being the concertmaster for the orchestra of the Utah Agricultural College (now Utah State University), he also played the violin for silent movies to earn money for college.

Jean wrote,

Later in life he rather let that talent go, but I do remember his playing the violin a little bit when I was very small.  Later when Randy took violin in school for a brief time, Dad got out his violin and tuned it.  It had not been tuned for a while, so it took some coaxing to get it to stay in tune.  But just seeing how he handled the instrument and the bow showed me that he had had great skill once.

I remember him playing the violin with me (or trying to, since I was so terrible at the time). I thought that was so cool.

Malcolm Hendricks Merrill playing his violin.

Julie Merrill Hinkson learned the violin and inherited Malcolm's violin, which she has to this day.

Julie Merrill with Malcolm Merrill's violin.
Family recital; Riverton, Utah; 22 November 2001.

Join us next time when Malcolm goes to college and meets a cute girl named Thelma!