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Violinist bows out after 61 years

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In 1955, a teenage violinist from Hoover High School played her first concert with the San Diego Symphony. On Sunday, after 61 years with the orchestra, she played her last.

At 77, Pat Francis bowed out after the season-closing concert at the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Music Center, ending the longest career in San Diego Symphony’s 106-year history. After 61 years in the orchestra’s string section, she said the hardest part of letting go isn’t the music, but the players and staff she’s grown to love like family.

“There’s never really a good time to leave because there’s so much going on and the symphony is the place where I get to see all my friends,” said Francis, a grandmother of six. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do but I’m just going to wait and see what life throws at me.”

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In truth, Francis plans to perform in the summer pops shows and she hopes to be invited back in future years as a substitute at the children’s concerts. But on Sunday, she walked away from Copley Symphony Hall for the last time, as well as the life of full-time musician.

Francis, an El Cajon resident, was one of three retiring musicians honored Sunday. Also stepping down were pianist Mary Barringer and violinist Randy Brinton, who both started with the symphony in 1975.

Before Sunday’s closing piece of “Chichester Psalms,” Symphony Executive Director Martha Gilmer gave thanks to all three musicians, saying the choral piece by Leonard Bernstein was an appropriate goodbye for its introspection and reflective nature. She saved her tribute to Francis for the last.

“She was the youngest musician ever hired and the longest-tenured,” Gilmer said of Francis, to prolonged applause. “Her fantastic career was a source of energy and light for all of us who came to work with her.”

Francis can’t say if she inherited her musical genes. She was adopted after her birth in Everett, Wash., and raised in Fresno by a couple with little interest in music. When Francis was 6 years old, her mother gave her a violin — a gift from a former boyfriend who was a violin maker -- and signed her up for lessons.

“My mother knew nothing about music, she was tone deaf and couldn’t sing, but she thought I needed something to do,” Francis said. “For some reason I just took to it. It was really weird. I might never have been adopted or I might never have been handed a violin. That I would be channeled into this was just this strange luck.”

Back in the 1940s, Fresno had no school orchestras but a strong chamber orchestra and she trained under good teachers. In 1954, her businessman father was transferred to San Diego and she became concert mistress for Hoover High’s band under conductor Walter Peterson, who also brought her into the San Diego Youth Symphony. She also became concert mistress for the San Diego Civic Youth Orchestra, which Peterson started with Dan Lewis, who she calls her favorite conductor and person.

Lewis knew the San Diego Symphony’s conductor at the time, Robert Shaw, and in August 1955, when she was just 16, she was invited to audition. She’s been there ever since.

She fondly remembers her first concert with guest conductor Ferde Grofé, composer of the “Grand Canyon Suite.” But asked to name her favorite or most challenging pieces from over the years and Francis draws a blank. After six decades as a working player, the music may be in her bones but she has a hard time picking out individual pieces. For her, it’s not the music that was memorable, but the people she played with.

Her favorite concerts were in October 1977 with comedian Danny Kaye, who kept the musicians and audience in stitches. She loved working with composer/conductor Marvin Hamlisch. And she had a nice interaction with actor Yul Brynner shortly before his death in 1985. While in town with “The King and I” tour, for which she played in the pit, Brynner ad-libbed several lines onstage about the homegrown berries and symphony cookbook she’d given him.

To supplement her meager orchestra income over the years, Francis earned a teaching credential from San Diego State University and taught K-7 music in the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District. During her teaching years, which wound down after she and her husband had two daughters, Laurie and Kellie, she started numerous school music programs, including a vocal music festival and a grant-funded study of guitar music.

In the early 1990s, she coached the orchestra at Helix High School. The conductor at that time, Russ Sperling, describes his now-longtime friend as a force of nature.

“She would wander through the rehearsals with her violin and listen to each player and sometimes stop the rehearsals to tell them what was wrong and exactly how to fix it,” said Sperling, now director of visual and performing arts with the San Diego Unified School District. “She alternated between being a grandmotherly sort, very warm and encouraging, to being a taskmaster. She was very serious about her music and impassioned about what kids were capable of doing.”

With the Symphony, Francis worked with the youth concerts, founded a fund-raising program, volunteered in the music library and headed the social committee. When guest artists came to town to perform, she was their volunteer tour guide and frequent dinner companion, which earned her the nickname “Mother Francis.”

Joe Kobryner, who met Francis when he worked in Symphony marketing and operations from 1975 to 1981, said she was known for taking care of everyone.

“Pat was so outgoing and such a sweet woman. She loved her craft and she loved her job,” said Kobryner, who’s been vice president of Broadway/San Diego for the past 20 years.

The most difficult years were in the 1980s and ‘90s, when the symphony struggled with financial problems, cutbacks and ultimately filed for bankruptcy and disbanded from 1996-1998. In the interim, Francis became a licensed massage therapist and taught music, but many musicians left town or were financially ruined.

“It was a very traumatic time,” she said. “Where do you go when you’re a musician out of work? You can’t just go to the next town and get in an orchestra, and what if you have family here and can’t afford to go anywhere else? It was a really hard time.”

Today, thanks to a $120 million gift from the Jacobs, the symphony is thriving, with many new young players joining each year from around the world. Francis said she is one of only three symphony members with San Diego roots.

Music Director Jahja Ling will step down at the end of next season, and auditions are under way to find a new conductor. Francis said she wishes she could stick around to meet the new leader, but she feels the time is right to go.

“I’m getting older now, it’s so demanding,” she said, adding that the long opera performances she was required to play in the winter months were too hard on her back.

Now with her calendar open, Francis said she’s thinking of taking some stained-glass classes and spending more time with her second husband, Dale, her daughters and her six grandsons, ages 11 to 23. Many of them, she said, have inherited music and singing skills.

She also plans to volunteer in the symphony’s library and said she’d be happy to be on standby with her violin and bow.

“The hardest part of walking away is losing that connection with my musical family,” she said. “I won’t see them again and that’s what makes it so hard.”

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