Seven months ago our post described a small brown mailing box containing the Quinn-Dex (see January 14, 2010) and its mailing label bearing Nettie Bullis's name. This box was brought to the Bullis Room by a local resident who found it while going through possessions left to her by a relative. We are grateful to this relative for adding it to our collection.
However, the Quinn-Dex raised a lot of questions: Did Nettie Bullis take Dr. Quinn's correspondence course? And if so, where did she practice? (We have no record of the Bullis family owning a piano or organ.) Did she visit the Conservatory or perhaps study on the Boston campus? We still have no answers to any of these questions, but we do have something just as exciting...a high level of interest in the inventor of the Quinn-Dex.
A great deal of information has been relayed to us about Dr. Marcus Quinn. (Thanks to everyone who responded!) Some of this information came from family, but the bulk of it was shared with us by Donna L. Halper (author, media historian, radio consultant, and currently Asst. Professor of Communication, Lesley University, Cambridge MA). Here are excerpts from Professor Halper's email to us:
"Marcus Lucius Quinn was born in Ireland in 1862. He and his family came to America in 1870 and seem to have emigrated to the midwest first, as we find him in the 1910 census living in Chicago. Around the turn of the century, he married a woman named Clara (living relatives tell me her full name was Clara Minetta Thomas and she was from Wisconsin originally); they had four kids, all boys. In 1910, Mr Quinn identified on the census as a "music teacher" but at some point, he seems to have opened his own studio. How I came to be interested in him is as a result of his career in music during the 1910s-- at some point, he met the man I've been doing my own research about-- Theodore Lyman Shaw. Mr. Shaw came from the distinguished family, the one that gave the world Robert Gould Shaw....
"Anyway, Theo became friendly with Marcus Lucius Quinn in Chicago in the 1910s, although how they met remains a mystery that I wish I could solve. When Theo returned to greater Boston circa 1918 (according to his alumni notes, given to Harvard University), Marcus Lucius Quinn moved here too. Theo could afford a fancy home on the Needham/Wellesley line, but Marcus and his family moved to Waban, a suburb of Newton. The two men remained friends and associates. Marcus Lucius (still identified on the 1920 census as a "music teacher")had begun offering private lessons in the early 1890s, according to copy from ads he placed in magazines, and he seemed to do fairly well with it, establishing correspondence courses to help people learn to play the piano. Somehow, he had the money to place LARGE ads for his services -- his living relatives believe some of this money came from his wife's side of the family. But wherever the money came from, the ads ran in some of the best-known publication of that time, during the period from the turn of the century to the 1920s-- the ads appeared in such places as McClure's, Leslie's, and what was then a literary magazine-- Cosmopolitan. Mr. Quinn appears to have been a very good self-promoter, who claimed he studied with Franz Liszt in Europe and he also claimed to have a Doctorate degree in Music....Whether or not Marcus Lucius Quinn really was the toast of Europe, his correspondence courses seemed to do well for him, and he was able to open the Marcus Lucius Quinn Conservatory of Music here in greater Boston. In the early 1920s, he located it at 598 Columbia Road in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, not far from the beautiful new Strand Theater (which had opened in 1918). This would have made good sense, as movie theaters back then also gave live performances between films, so his students might have found a ready-made venue to demonstrate their skills."
We greatly appreciate Professor Halper taking the time to share this information with us. As with all new information, however, more questions are raised. Did Nettie Bullis see Dr. Quinn's ad in an issue of McClure's? or Cosmopolitan? Did she order it herself, or was it a gift from a friend or relative? If you have the answers to any of our questions, please let us hear from you.
