Music has always mattered to Lee Ronnel.
At one point in his life it may have even been a matter of life and death.
Born in pre-WWII China to musician parents in an expatriate Russian community, Lee Ronnel is a longtime Little Rock businessman, an American by his citizenship and service and a music lover by his nature and heritage. Ronnel and his wife Dale are two of the city’s greatest, longtime champions of classical music, and have lent their money, time and efforts to their favorite cause, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and its various programs and initiatives.
That includes the ASO’s Opus Ball, the annual gala that supports the symphony’s music education programs. This year’s event is scheduled for Nov. 14, at the Capital Hotel.
“You know galas are important to Little Rock for all organizations involved in the arts,” says Lee, 79. “They’re a way to bring people to these functions to continue participating in their sponsorships and the funds they deliver. It reminds them of their obligations to an organization that’s as strong and powerful as [the ASO] is to the arts in Little Rock.”
Ronnel’s childhood Russian accent has long been swept away by time and his experiences, and in his quiet, measured speech it is hard to even hear traces of the New Yorker he once was. But it was in his father’s native Russia, in Ronnel’s early childhood in war-torn China and in his adopted hometown of New York that Ronnel acquired the passion for music that he sustains today.
Among his favorite pieces of music, Ronnel most cherishes Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerti No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, the works his father, a pianist and conductor, used to play before he died when Lee was only 6.
“Those were his and I’ve never heard anyone do it better,” Ronnel says.
Lee and Dale, three years his junior, have been married for 55 years, the happy union of a well-traveled military man — he was an Air Force officer — and a native Southerner with roots in Mississippi and family in Little Rock.
But if not for a few twists of fate and the immeasurable role of music, Lee might never have come to the states, let alone marry, move to the South and become a local symphony patron.
China Connection
Lee’s father, Leo Itkis, was a Ukrainian graduate of the Rimsky-Korsakov Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. By the 1930s he was an accompanist for a Russian ballet troupe touring the Far East and on its way to Vladivostok, when the troupe’s agent routed the party to Harbin, Manchuria.
The area was home to a community of some 75,000 Russians and Russian Jews who had settled after fleeing their homes during the Russian Revolution, Civil War and WWI.
“They defected,” Lee says. “They all defected. And they wound up in various parts of China.”
Lee’s father met his mother, Dora Paley, a graduate of the Harbin Institute of Music, in Shanghai, where his father wound up conducting the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.
His parents “fell in love, got married and had me,” Ronnel says. That was 1936. In 1937, Japan invaded China, sparking intense conflict.
While captured soldiers from Great Britain and other countries were thrown into nearby camps, and Japanese forces committed war crimes and atrocities throughout Asia, Ronnel’s family stayed relatively safe even after his father’s death. Fortuitously, it turned out, his mother had purchased an interest in a music shop.
If members of Japanese occupying forces had soft spots, they appeared to be for music and children, so Ronnel and his mother, who lived in the same condominium complex as the Japanese general staff, were largely left alone. Ronnel even weeded the officers’ vegetable gardens to make a little extra money.
“The Japanese loved music, and they were our best customers,” Ronnel says.
Nonetheless, when the U.S. Marines landed in 1945, Ronnel giddily raced to the docks to see them come ashore. Little did he know his future stepfather, a naturalized U.S. citizen and American military officer with a background at Harbin, would be among them.
Eliot Ronnel had attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before getting his commission and traveling with Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces throughout the Pacific. He had known Ronnel’s mother when they were schoolchildren in Harbin, and they struck up a new relationship and married.
The family soon relocated to suburban Tuckahoe, New York. Ronnel attended the Mannes School of Music in the city and worked with a music coach to perfect his own piano playing, while his mother taught lessons.
“My mother promised my father she would keep me practicing and getting coaches until such time as I didn’t want to do it,” Ronnel says.
College, then his burgeoning military career, began to pull Ronnel away from his lessons in the late 1950s. And there would be another, more important distraction when Ronnel and his fellow trainees took a fateful trip South.
12 Dates
Dale Grundfest grew up in tiny Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a town of about 2,000 not far from the stretch of the Mississippi River that separates her home state from her mother’s native Arkansas. There were 16 students in Dale’s high school graduating class, yet despite the town’s small size her family did its best to broaden her horizons.
Dale’s mother took her to community concerts in Vicksburg, and her parents sent her to Tulane University in New Orleans, where she took a music appreciation course.
“Kind of like typing in high school, it was maybe one of the better things I did,” Dale says.
By summer of 1958, the family had arranged a trip to England for Dale later that year. But first there was a party to attend.
Dale’s aunt was on an entertainment committee that had arranged a dance for a group of Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets temporarily reassigned from the northeast to the Greenville, Mississippi, base. Among them was Lee, who took enough of an interest in Dale to show up at a luncheon at her aunt’s home the next day.
Despite their diverse backgrounds, the two dated until Lee returned to New York and Dale set off to England.
“I heard from him a couple of times and then I didn’t hear from him,” Dale says. “I was heartbroken.”
Lee admits to being a poor pen pal.
“I’m bad about that,” he says.
When she finally did get a letter from Lee, Dale’s heartbreak turned to anger, and if not for the urging of her friends she might not have responded. In the meantime Lee, despite his lack of correspondence, had contacted Dale’s family to get permission to meet her ship at the dock when it returned.
“I called her parents and asked when she was coming back and met the ship, and we were married about a year later in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, a metropolis in the Delta,” Lee says.
Upon her return from England, Dale finished college at Tulane, while Lee entered basic Air Force training in San Antonio and then was stationed in Waco, Texas, for navigator school as a 2nd lieutenant.
When the couple married on July 3, 1960, they had only been together in person 12 times. And even their honeymoon was to be short-lived; Lee had July 4 off but had to back in navigator school July 6.
“So you can say we honeymooned in Waco, Texas,” Dale says. “How many people can say they honeymooned in Waco, Texas?”
“Flight school doesn’t really do anything but force you to do odd things,” Lee says.
Musical Pursuits
Lee spent five years in the Air Force, including a stint as a C-124 transport navigator in Vietnam, where his aircraft came back from missions with its share of bullet holes.
“When they started shooting at him he decided he could find a better job to do,” Dale says.
In what are known as 3-2 degree programs, Lee had attended both Carnegie Technical Institute (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh to learn engineering, and New York University to study business.
When he completed his military hitch, Lee was planning to work as an industrial engineer at Socony Mobile Oil Company (later to become Mobile Oil) in New York, but a conversation with his father-in-law diverted him.
“He told me not to do a darn thing and not sign any contracts until I talked to his brother-in-law in Little Rock,” Lee says.
After 15 years working for Dale’s uncle at his scrap metal company, Lee opened his own business, the Metal Recycling Corporation, which is still in operation and is also the place of business for the couple’s two sons, Steve and Mike.
Blessed with three children total and five grandchildren, the Ronnels have spent their time in Little Rock not only growing a business and a family, but pursuing philanthropic efforts that have included growing the city’s appreciation of classical music.
In addition to their monetary support of the ASO over the years, both have or are serving on the ASO board — Lee is a past chairman — as well as the ASO Foundation board. Dale is a former president of the ASO Society Guild and has more than once been treasurer for the Guild’s designer house and volunteers with the ASO “Orchestra and You” program in elementary schools.
“They both give their passion, dedication, leadership, time, and love to make the ASO here for generations,” says symphony executive director Christina Littlejohn.
The Ronnels have also joined forces to bring notable talent to Little Rock. By pledging the support of her husband’s business, Dale secured a visit and recital performance by acclaimed violinist and conductor Itzhak Perlman.
Lee, a lifetime ASO member, worked with ASO committees in the searches that brought both David Itkin and current director of music Philip Mann to the symphony.
“Lee and Dale have both held important leadership positions within the ASO family,” says Mann, “playing vital roles in guiding the ASO through both challenge and success, introducing thousands of young Arkansans to musical instruments, bringing world-class artists to Arkansas, supporting the musicians of the ASO, leading two of the best boards and guilds in the business and setting the stage for the remarkable story that is now being told. On a personal note, they were instrumental in our decision to come to Arkansas, and made it their mission to make us feel immediately welcome and at home.”
After spending much of his youth in New York and availing himself of music opportunities ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall to chamber music and individual performances at The Town Hall, Lee Ronnel says it has been a pleasure to watch Arkansas’ classical music scene grow during his years here, and to have had a hand in that growth.
“Little Rock was never loaded with good music by good musicians, and the quality has increased tremendously over the last 40 years, 50 years,” he says.
“That’s what built my excitement and my participation on the board, serving as its chairman. I have never had as much fun as co-chairing the search for David Itkin and chairing the search for the position filled by Philip Mann. Truly some of the most delightful musical periods of my life.”
Opus Ball XXXI
6 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 14
Capital Hotel
OpusBall.org
New Kids on the Block: The ASO’s Creative Corridor Space
The ASO’s new 10,000-SF space at the 500 block of Main St., in the Creative Corridor, will house four different ASO Youth Ensembles and it will serve as rehearsal space for the Community Orchestra and also provide office space for the ASO administration team.
“We anticipate launching the new Sturgis Music Academy for after-school music lessons,” says ASO executive director Christina Littlejohn. “Our professional musicians plan to give after-hours and lunchtime concerts in the new space.”
Planned for at least three years, the space will help the ASO expand its services and programs.
“Children from across the state participate in the youth ensembles, and this will give them a professional artistic space in which to rehearse,” Littlejohn says. “The new headquarters will allow us to expand our music education service to after-school instrumental instruction. In addition, the new headquarters has a lobby plus performance space so we can have receptions and concerts to allow ASO musicians the chance to get to know our audience members better.”
ASO also recently launched SHARP, a social group of young professionals in their 20s and 30s that attends ASO social events and concerts, and gets to know ASO board members and other volunteers. By doing so, SHARP members expand the knowledge of and interest in the ASO to an up-and-coming, younger audience. To learn more about SHARP and other ASO programs, visit ArkansasSymphony.org.