He practiced medicine for 62 years, first in Ontonagon and then for over 40 years in Marquette. She taught piano to generations of U.P. students for more than 64 years. Many local residents still remember taking piano lessons from Mrs. Swinton or visiting Dr. Swinton in the Savings Bank Building for their school physicals.

Alma Williams, born in Vermontville, Michigan in 1879, was the child of an artist and a doctor. As a child she lived for several years in Paris, where she took her first piano lessons.

Andrew Lester Swinton was born in Kansas in 1877 but his family soon moved to Calumet, where his father worked for the copper mines.

The couple met at Olivet College, but when Lester (as Alma always called him) graduated and moved to Ann Arbor for medical school, Alma transferred to Wellesley college, where she graduated with a degree in music in 1899. The day after their September 1900 wedding, the couple took off for their new home in the lumber boom town of Ontonagon.

Andrew Lester Swinton

Although Ontonagon did not come as a surprise for someone who’d grown up in rough and tumble Calumet, it was quite a change for a young Wellesley graduate who’d lived in Paris. In her delightful memoir, I Married a Doctor, she recounts cows–and drunks–stumbling into their yard, amputations in the front room of the house, winter drives to outlying farms so treacherous that Dr. Swinton hired a man to come with him to help winch him out of the many snowdrifts on the unplowed roads, and at least three major fires. Plus, of course, “…medical ignorance, vermin, epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps, measles; broken bones and terrible injuries from the saw-mills, lumber camps, railroads…”

The Swintons enmeshed themselves in the life of the town. Dr. Swinton served as the local health official and was a member of the school board and vice-president of the local bank. Mrs. Swinton started a study group, taught contemporary dances to young couples, organized pageants, and operettas, and gave numerous recitals. Although they were Episcopalian, Mrs. Swinton nonetheless served on the board of the Methodist church and Dr. Swinton on the Presbyterian board. When the local druggist died, Lester ran the local pharmacy until a purchaser was found.

Mrs. Swinton had not intended to become a piano teacher, but when a young girl asked for lessons, she took the responsibility very seriously. There was a pianist in Calumet who had trained at the London Conservatory of Music. So twice a month for seven years Mrs. Swinton took the afternoon train to Calumet and spent the evening with her teacher going over her lesson plans. The next day she took her own lesson and watched him teach for the rest of the day, and then took the train home, lugging her suitcase of teaching materials, on the third day. She continued her studies throughout her life, taking lessons almost everywhere she traveled, not only in Chicago and New York City, but also in Paris, London, and Buenos Aires.

The family, which now included two sons, Neil and Aubrey, moved to Marquette in 1918. The couple later adopted a daughter, Kathryne. Continuing his involvement in civic affairs, Lester was a charter member of Marquette Lions Club-the first Lions Club in the state of Michigan. As city health officer in 1955 he organized mobile x-ray clinics that reached more than 5200 people. A large part of his caseload was what was then called “industrial medicine” -relating to workplace injuries- and his testimony in several cases resulted in employees receiving long-denied compensation for their injuries. After Coleman Peterson, represented by John Voelker, was famously acquitted “by reason of temporary insanity” of the Big Bay murder of Mike Chenoweth, Dr. Swinton was one of the two local physicians who examined Peterson and determined that he was sane and posed no continuing threat to the community.

Mrs. Swinton quickly had a full roster of students and a full schedule of recitals. By 1930 she was president of the Michigan Music Teachers Association. She attended the na Alma tional meeting in New York that year, where she saw Arturo Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic and watched the Russian inventor Leon Theremin play his “ether wave machine.” Over the years she won numerous awards for her contributions to music education.

Although the Swintons had the means and the time to travel all over the world, collecting the beautiful glass pieces that decorated the big bay window in their Arch Street home, their lives were not without tragedy. Their younger son, Aubrey drowned in a canoe accident in Lake Superior in 1932, the summer before he was to begin medical school. Their adopted daughter Kathryne left Marquette sometime before 1940 and was not mentioned in either Lester’s obituary at the time of his death on January 19, 1963, or in Alma’s, two years later on April 25, 1965.

The Swintons knew that life was often not easy. But they also knew the beauty and healing power of music. For more about the value of music as medicine, plan to attend the History Center’s new Senior Support Series. The first in the series is titled Music as Medicine and will be taking place for free at the Marquette Regional History Center on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m. Feb. 21.

Join us as we learn from the professional musicians of the Superior String Alliance Chamber Players. This program will spark the connections and benefits of music in our lives. Interactive activities include a live duet of a piece by Reinhold Gliere performed alongside a slideshow of photographs from Marquette in 1909, the year this piece was composed. Audience discussion of the photo and music pairing and information on the instruments played will be one activity among others.