High Profile: MARTHA RIVERS INGRAM

Leading Spoleto's 'pleasure palace of arts' in Charleston

When then-22-year-old Martha Rivers Ingram was a disc jockey in 1957, she had a radio program that lasted four hours each night. The first part, called 'Candlelight and Wine,' consisted of semiclassical, Mantovani-type fare during the dinner hour.

But then more serious music floated over the airwaves with the likes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and on Sundays, a full opera. Wanting her evenings free, Ingram earlier recorded her comments on the pieces, and the radio engineer spliced them between numbers.

'When I returned from Vassar College, where I would take the train to see world-class symphonies, plays and ballet in New York, I realized how much I wanted Charlestonians to experience the pleasure palace of arts activities,' Ingram asserts in a phone conversation from Nashville, her home of nearly 50 years.

On Friday, her dream of promoting the arts in Charleston reached a new level when she was elected the first female chair of Spoleto Festival USA's board of directors at its annual New York meeting.

Of course, being called 'the first woman chair' is nothing new to Ingram, who earned the title in both high-level businesses and the nonprofit arena.

'Just don't call me a ‘chairwoman,' ' she says with a laugh. 'I'll take ‘chairman' or ‘chair,' but I think chairwoman sounds a bit degrading.'

Festival faithful

Ingram, a native Charlestonian whose family formerly owned radio stations and WCSC-TV (one of the first TV stations in South Carolina), has attended all 32 seasons of the Spoleto Festival. In 1994, she joined its board, where she served as president for five years.

'I always came down by myself, and I so enjoyed attending that first week with my parents,' she says. 'I was thrilled at Charles Wads- worth's chamber series, hearing Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax and enjoyed all the operas, especially ‘Amistad.' And the dance has been wonderful — Alvin Ailey and Twyla Tharp — and marvelous theater like ‘The Constant Wife' and ‘A Doll's House.' '

She explains, 'I was supposed to take over as Spoleto chair two years ago, but I asked the chairman, Eric Friberg, if he could stay on until the festival's project, the Memminger Auditorium, was completed. Since I was living in Nashville, I couldn't be there to oversee it. And so Eric was gracious enough to serve five years as chairman.'

Friberg says, 'Martha is an extraordinary woman, both in the business and the philanthropic world; plus, she has the Charleston roots that are so important to the future of Spoleto.'

With her track record, Ingram is not intimidated by taking the helm of an organization that is in the red for the first time in 13 years.

After all, she was the first female chair of the Ingram Industries Board after working there starting in 1979 as director of public affairs. After the death of her husband, Bronson Ingram, in 1995, she became chair, serving until 2008. She is now chairman emerita of Ingram Industries, one of the nation's largest distribution companies, noted for Ingram Micro, the world's largest technology distributor.

The arts rule

When she was growing up on Church Street, Ingram's main brush with the arts consisted of eight years of piano lessons, riding her bike around Colonial Lake to the home of her teacher, Hester B. Finger.

'My father had always wanted me to know about his business because he worried something might happen to him, and I would be needed to support the family since I'm 10 years older than my brother (John Rivers Jr.) and my younger sister (Elizabeth Rivers) had already decided she wanted to be a teacher,' explains Ingram.

After college, when she asked her father if she could take the FM part of the radio station for a program, he said, 'How would you do this?'

'I told him I had read some stations were separating their AM and FM bands and offered different programming on each,' explains Ingram. 'He said, ‘If you can find some advertisers, you can do whatever you damn well please.' '

And she did.

Although Ingram's program had a small audience, she felt she contributed to the city's cultural life. But after a year, Princeton graduate Bronson Ingram of Nashville, whom she had met when she was at Vassar, asked her to marry him.

So it was goodbye, Charleston, and hello, Nashville, where Ingram discovered the same stagnation of interest in the arts.

Nashville role

Although she had a growing family, in 1972, Ingram served on the advisory board of the $16 million Tennessee Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1980 after eight years of struggle.

'I thought it was going to be a sprint, but it was a marathon,' she says, recalling how Nashville's mayor turned her down flat when she asked for his support for the center.

Ingram's next major project was to serve as the vice chair of the steering committee to build the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Completed in 2006 at a cost of $125 million, it houses the Nashville Symphony, which has a $28 million budget.

Today, Ingram is determined that Spoleto Festival USA will emerge from the recession intact. 'We hope our patrons will continue to support us; of course, last year we were very disappointed when the Legislature decided not to fund the festival,' she says.

But at 73, she is happy as she works to ensure that Charleston remains an arts mecca, and she looks forward to staying in her Meeting Street home.

'I'll be spending more time in Charleston now,' she says. 'And it's going to be just wonderful.'

Dottie Ashley may be reached at 937-5704 or dashley@postandcourier.com.

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