Cecile Dupont Martin

Cecile Dupont Martin, 1910-2005

Renee' Peck
Staff writer

Cecile Dupont Martin was born in 1910 and grew up in a double on Dumaine Street, just off Broad Avenue. It was a house filled with music.

"Mother had her 5-foot Steinway baby grand on one side of the house, and Aunt Julie had her 6-foot Steinway baby grand on the other," said Judith Martin, Cecile's daughter. "One would be practicing scales while the other was playing Beethoven sonatas."

Cecile and her older sister, Juliette, developed a reputation for piano duets that earned them a regular Saturday-night concert slot on WDSU radio in the 1930s. The two sisters gave piano concerts around town through the 1970s.

The shy, soft-spoken concert pianist had another side, too: In the classroom, Cecile was known as "the lion tamer."

"She taught for 40 years, all ages and all over the place," Judith said. "Audubon, Coleton, Beauregard, F.T. Howard. She was so unassuming, but she could stand up for herself. And she could bring an unruly class to order in a matter of seconds, even though she stood only an inch above 5 feet in her stack-heel shoes."

In the Lakeview home where she had moved as a bride, Cecile Martin loved to entertain. During the holidays, she would make "boxes and boxes" of pfefferneusses, little anise-flavored cookies covered in powdered sugar.

"She loved to sew and made wardrobes for all my dolls," Judith said. "Her other hobby was gardening; she grew rose bushes for decades, until she got older and couldn't do the pruning."

Norwood Hingle, pastor of Lake Vista United Methodist Church, which the Martins attended, called Cecile "a New Orleanian to the core. . . . She could relate to people of all ages and truly enjoyed them," Hingle said.

Cecile Martin turned 95 on Aug. 23. Mother and daughter stayed in their Lakeview home during the storm. When the water began to rise, Judith Martin floated her mother to the attic stairs, and then helped push her up the steps.

"We were in water that was up to my chin -- her head was just barely out of water," Judith said. "Then she had a slip, and we both nearly went under.

"I pulled her up onto the steps. Suddenly, she said quietly, but with determination, 'I give up.' Then she pitched forward into the water."

Judith Martin spent the night in the attic and, the next morning, decided to make a swim through the neighborhood toward help and higher ground.

More than a month would pass before search teams retrieved Cecile Martin's body from her house. The morgue at St. Gabriel received her remains Oct. 3 and established positive identification Nov. 21.

"Mother had a special wish for her ashes," Judith Martin said. "She wanted me to use them with potting soil to plant a favorite type of rose bush -- Queen Elisabeth -- in a giant flower pot in the garden.

"When I first returned home on Oct. 26, I found a giant flower pot in the yard. It had floated in from a neighbor's front yard half a block away. Somehow, I think it was meant as a message to me, to keep my promise about the rose bush and the flower pot."

Published in The Times-Picayune