Maude E. Dabbs, Daughter of James and Jessie Dabbs

Maude Elizabeth Dabbs  (8/20/1920 – 1/13/2001) and Robert Haas

If there was ever an off-spring who had the Warren in her, it was undoubtedly Maude.  She hitchhiked across the state by herself.  Her aunts were mortified.  She published a wedding announcement that thumbed her nose at society and made jest of the proper rituals of southern etiquette.  They all shook their heads in disbelief.  Born and raised most of her early life in Hartsville while her father was at Coker College, she was only 13 yrs. old when her mother died.  She was independent and a free spirit at an early age and her father was either too self-absorbed to notice at the time, or encouraged her exuberance.  Regardless, he did not discourage her streak of independence.   When her father married Edith and moved back to Rip Raps she was a young woman on her way to Coker College.  She stayed there for only a year before transferring to Black Mountain College in North Carolina.    There she met Robert Haas (4/16/1898 – 12/05/1997)

Robert was forty years old, 22 years her senior, and had already developed a reputation in Vienna, Austria, as a fine calligrapher, printer, and photographer.  He was a collector of ancient glass, coins and incunabula (books, sheets of paper or images printed prior to 1501 in Europe).  One of his most famous finds was wandering past a laundry in Manhattan and seeing a small sign that said “manuscripts for sale.”  There he recognized 8 pages by Erhart Ratoldt from Augsburg in 1493. When he approached the register to see how much they wanted for the 8 pages, the response was $1.00.  “You want $1.00?” Robert asked in total disbelief.

“OK,” the teller said, “take them for 75 cents.”  They were worth thousands.

  Robert fled Austria during the Holocaust and came to Black Mountain, NC, because of a commitment the college had made to help Jewish refugees.  But Black Mountain College was struggling financially and there was not enough work to support him. While walking through the majestic Robert E. Lee Hall one day he happened to hear Maude practicing the piano and thus their relationship began. Within the year, however, he moved back to New York City where he hoped to find better employment.   Maude left for Boston to study under Nadia Boulander at the Longy Conservatory in Boston.  She taught music at the Bancroft School in Worchester, Massachusetts, and moved to New York in 1944, when Robert offered her a job.  Robert complained that it took him a long time to convince her to marry him because of their age difference.  One of his wooing techniques was to buy her a piano for her birthday.  She arrived home to find it being hoisted by a lift into her upstairs apartment.  It worked.  They married in 1946.

 Her great love for music was a lifetime career, similar to that of her mother’s.  After they were married she taught students out of her home studio and at the Westchester Conservatory of Music in White Plains, NY.  There are fond memories of Maude’s love for jazz and she and the girls dancing around the living room, laughing and moving with the music.

  Maude was as much into the art and beauty of the sound as Robert was into the art of the picture and the print.  Robert loved classical music, Mozart being his personal favorite composer.  Robert was known in many circles as an authority on the great composer.  An interesting note is that after his marriage to Maude, he realized that their marriage date was the same as Mozart’s marriage date to Constanza, August 4^th, and he died the same date as Mozart’s death on Dec. 5^th.

 One of Maude’s favorite composers was the famous Russian composer and pianist, Rachmaninoff.  She found his music wove the great mystery of life into the sadness and tragedy that it often bought.  Music was Maude’s emotional life. Cathy and Miriam would often see her easily moved to tears by beautiful music.

            Robert lived to be almost 100 years old.  During his years in the United States, he established the Ram Printing Company and photographed many famous people including Einstein and Toscanini.  During his last years, Maude devoted herself to caring for him, but his care and death took its toll on her.  Three years after Robert died,   Maude experienced a fall that cracked two vertebrate in her neck.   She moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to be with her daughter, Cathy, and son-in-law, Tom.  This move, however, separated her from her granddaughter, Corinna, whose own love for the piano she had closely nurtured and supported throughout the years.  One of Maude’s happiest and most emotionally fulfilling events in her last year was hearing Corinna present a concert of difficult piano music she’d worked diligently and lovingly to prepare as a Christmas gift to her grandmother.  As Maude found herself less able to communicate either verbally or musically,  she seemed to lose her desire to live.  She died at the age of 80.