Mount Union borough

Martye Awkerman of Mount Union

Martha Jean Awkerman, known as Martye, was born August 31, 1928, and graduated from Mount Union High School in 1946. A remembrance published in 2009 by a fellow Air Force musician says she studied music with J. Richard Burkholder and was named first chair solo cornet at a Pennsylvania schools state band competition.

The same writer says a scholarship took her to the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. The conservatory's 1949 yearbook lists Martha Awkerman of Mt. Union among its juniors, a trumpet student and a member of Sigma Alpha Iota. According to the remembrance she taught trumpet there until 1951, traveled with an all-girl promotional band for George Hormel until 1953, spent time with a USO band in New York, and took a combo of her own to play military bases in Alaska. She then came back to Mount Union to teach and to do further study at Penn State.

She also served in the Women's Air Force Band as cornet soloist and dance band leader and reached the rank of master sergeant. In July 1960, when the WAF Band was coming to Bixby Park in Long Beach, California, the Independent Press-Telegram ran her picture and called her the only woman coach horn player in the military services. The paper explained that the old coach horn has no valves and sounds only four notes.

The Long Beach Municipal Band opened its 1962 summer concerts with what the same paper called a first in the band's history, two women soloists, one of them Martha Awkerman on cornet. The remembrance says she spent 22 years with that band and was the first woman it ever took in. She was with it in May 1974, when the paper pictured her modeling the band's new uniforms and counted three women among its 34 members.

She died at Carlisle on June 9, 2008, and was buried in her hometown, in Mount Union Cemetery. Her inscription reads MSGT US Air Force.

Checked against the record. We read the Long Beach pages and the 1949 yearbook on the scans. Her dates and inscription come from her Find a Grave memorial, and we have not seen the stone itself. Her study with Burkholder, the state competition honor, the scholarship, the Hormel and USO years, the Alaska trip, the 22 years with the Long Beach band and the claim that she was its first woman member all rest on one 2009 remembrance and a short biography printed with it on the Taps Bugler website, so the story attributes them to that writer. The 1962 paper says two women soloists were featured for the first time that summer, which is not the same claim as a first woman member. Still open: the state competition is given no year, we found no program for it, and we found no conservatory record of the scholarship. The remembrance dates her Air Force band years from 1954 to 1961, while the biography says six years, so the story gives no dates for her service.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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