May Beegle

Alice May Beegle was born in Bedford, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Thomas Paul Beegle Sr. and Margaret Keyser Beegle. She studied piano as a girl.[1][2]

Beegle began working as a secretary at the Pittsburgh Orchestra.[3] She founded the Pittsburgh Orchestra Association and the Pittsburgh Friends of Music Society.[4] She organized the Ellis Concert Series and the Sewickley Concerts[5] before starting her own booking agency in 1923.[6] The May Beegle concert series began in 1921 with English singer Florence Easton,[7] and brought performing artists from Enrico Caruso and Anna Pavlova to Yehudi Menuhin and Marian Anderson to the city over the next three decades.[8][9] She also promoted orchestra concerts for children, reaching thousands of students in the Pittsburgh area.[1] She was active in the National Concert Managers' Association,[10][11] and was known as the "dean of Pittsburgh impresarios."[12] "Through May Beegle," noted a 1922 report, "Pittsburgh is promised an unusually brilliant season of orchestral and recital attractions."[13]

During World War I she and her sister Helena Viola Beegle worked with the American Red Cross in Pittsburgh.[14] She was a member of the Business and Professional Women's Club of Allegheny County, and of the Women's Press Club.[15]

Beegle was sued in 1929 by Italian opera singer Pasquale Amato, after she referred to him as a "has-been."[16]

Beegle lived with her sister Helena in Pittsburgh. May Beegle died in 1943, aged 61 years (according to her death certificate; the New York Times and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obituaries gave her age as 56).[15][17] Her brother Thomas P. Beegle continued her concert series until his death in 1946,[18][19] and then his son Bill Beegle ran the May Beegle Concerts series, through 1954.[20] The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh holds a collection of programs from the May Beegle Concerts.[21]

• Alice May Beegle at Find a Grave
• A 1941 photograph of May Beegle, from Getty Images.