History: A Blast From The Past
We would now like to pose a question to our readers... Did you know?
We are of the notion that an extraordinary component exists within the study and writing of history; that being that one simply cannot stick their hands in the air and say “I find nothing to study nor write of!” We become more entrenched in that notion with each piece we research and write for the DAS&RDC Bulletin.
Take for instance the URL we stumbled upon recently. This short YouTube video clip shows us the dance scene in ‘The Great Train Robbery,’ a 12 minute silent film made by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. and produced by Edwin S. Porter. This was filmed during November 1903 at Edison's New York studio, in Essex County Park in New Jersey, and along the Lackawanna Railroad. The scene portrays a Square Dance and Virginia Reel in a barroom dance hall. This typical Western dance house scene shows a large number of men and women in a lively quadrille. A ‘Tenderfoot’ appears on the scene. He is quickly spotted, pushed to the center of the hall, and compelled to dance a jig, while the bystanders amuse themselves by shooting dangerously close to his feet. Suddenly the door opens and the half dead telegraph operator staggers in. The crowd gathers around him, while he relates what has happened. Immediately the dance breaks up in confusion. The men secure their guns and hastily leave in pursuit of the outlaws.
We have yet to find an older film depiction of square dancing. The link for the video is below. Although it lasts but 52 seconds, we found it fun to watch and hope you do as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAKzI5_QFp0
We would now like to pose a question to our readers.
What do the clubs Polka Dots, Blue Nova Round Dance, Fiddlesteppers, Red Hot Country Squares, Rollin’ Wheels, Plus.Com, Swing Thru’s, Rocky Mountain Squares, and Mountaineers all have in common?
No, it’s not that their members dance or have a good time! The clubs, currently or in the past, have danced at venues known as Grange Halls. Golden Gate Grange, Grandview Grange, Maple Grove Grange, Victory Grange, Wheat Ridge Grange; these buildings have been home to many ‘square through fours’, ‘right & left grands’, ‘promenades’ and ‘phase II two-steps.’
Did you know?
- The Grange, officially referred to as The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, is a fraternal organization in the United States that encourages families to band together to promote the economic and political well-being of the community and agriculture. It was founded after the Civil War in 1867.
- When the Grange first began in 1867, it borrowed some of its rituals and symbols from Freemasonry, including secret meetings, oaths and special passwords. This is no longer practiced.
- The Colorado State Grange was established in the Colorado Territory in 1874 to give support and encouragement to rural and agricultural communities.
- The Grandview Grange at University Blvd. and Orchard Road was home to the Mountaineers for 37 1/2 years, until the snowstorm of March 18, 2003 claimed it as one of its victims, collapsing the roof and buckling the walls.
Thank you Grange Halls Past, Present and Future!
Again, as Your Council Historians we’ll endeavor to seek out those callers, those dancers, those communities, those events, those writings, those images of the past that may enrich our own experiences as square dancers today.
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In this issue, we revisit the monumental occasion that occurred on October 3, 2014
Last month we mentioned a few of the anniversary dances that were happening at various clubs along with some tidbits from the Timberline Toppers Square Dance Club.
We would like, however, to revisit the monumental occasion that occurred on October 3, 2014. That night the oldest square dance club in America held a dinner dance, celebrating their 75th anniversary. Congratulations Kilowatt Eights! 75 years is a long time for a social group of people to remain active in a given endeavor. We wanted to explore the rich history of Kilowatt Eights in our blast but quickly realized that scratching the surface is the best we could accomplish in our allowed bulletin space. So with an admission that more will be left unsaid than said about the history of the Kilowatt Eights Square Dance Club we will attempt to get our readers, as fluently as possible, from;.
The Kilowatt Eights (K8s) Square Dance Club was founded in the summer of 1939 by Tom T. (Joe) Lang, an assistant supervisor in the electric meter division of the Public Service Company (PSC) of Colorado (now Excel Energy). With the help of two other employees he gained the sponsorship of the PSC Employees’ Gas & Electric Club and formed a six piece band. The club became known as the G & E Square Dance Club. With permission to use the PSC’s garage at, 3rd Ave. and Lipan St., as a dance hall, the G & E Club held its first dance in October of 1939. Employees steam cleaned the floor of the garage, moved the lunch-room piano in on a flatbed trailer and brought in a second flatbed to accommodate the band in preparation for the dances. Joe Lang not only organized the G& E Square Dance Club but was the club caller from 1939 until 1956
The club danced in the PSC garage until 1942 and lost many of its members to World War II. Joe Lang renovated a small barn and named it the Hayloft where the club danced during the war. They returned to the PSC garage after the war. The club began to outgrow the garage and in 1948 moved to the Wight Building at 1433 Champa Street in downtown Denver. 1956 brought much change to the club; Joe Lang retired as the club caller; was replaced by protégé Loren Pace, who served from 1956 until 1960; and the G & E Square Dance Club became the Kilowatt Eights Square Dance Club with Reddy Kilowatt as the club symbol.
The 8th National Square Dance Convention was held in Denver in 1959 and set an attendance record for the national event of 8,824 square dancers, 3,314 from Colorado. Various members of K8s played a large part in the successful presentation of the 8th National Convention. Naming a few of the folks involved can be a dangerous endeavor as invariably some will not be mentioned. Out apologies to those we fail to give credit to. Vern and Lu Hunt served as Program Coordinators and served on the Mailing Committee as well. Lloyd and Pat Schmidt served on the PR and Publicity Committee and chaired the After Dance Events Committee, all the while being vice-presidents of the DAS&RDC.
In June of 1960, K8s club presidents Bob and Virginia Glendinning began a search for a club caller to replace Loren Pace, who had been transferred by PSC to Leadville. Charlie Tuffield was selected and started as club caller in September of 1960. His wife Jerry would become the club cuer as well. During 1962 a K8s’ dance was 50 cents per couple. The club also began dancing at the PSC Belleview Service Station in Littleton because the club was denied permission to use the auditorium of the new PSC building at 15th and Welton Streets. In the late 1960s K8’s membership began to decline due in part to the decentralized location of the club venue in Littleton. The club asked for permission of the G & E Club and PSC to open membership, as well as to hold a club office, to non-PSC employees. These requests were granted with the exception of the office of club treasurer, who still had to be an active or retired employee of PSC.
PSC decided to convert the Belleview Service Center auditorium into a laboratory in 1977 and informed K8s in January, 1978 to find a new square dance home by March; in two months! The move from Littleton to the Fellowship Hall of the First United Presbyterian Church in Englewood during the spring of 1978 began an odyssey of dance homes for K8s. Early in the 1980s the moved to Terry Elementary School in Sheridan, staying only a year before moving on to Oliver Elementary School also in Sheridan. The club lost the Oliver school venue in 1982 and on November 19, 1982 held a dance at the Grandview Grange at University Blvd. and Orchard Road. In 1983 it was on to the Glendale Fire Station at 999 South Clermont Street. The 50th Anniversary Dance, October 7, 1989, was held at the Driscoll Center on the campus of the University of Denver.*
*A side note; after completing square dance lessons, current K8s presidents Ron and Karen Dreher became active members of the club in the spring of 1989 and danced at that 50th Anniversary Dance.
In subsequent years, anniversary dances were held at the Glendale Community Center (54th), Augustana Lutheran Church (55th & 56th), Glendale CC (57th), and the Malley Community Center in Englewood (58th). The Malley Center became home to K8s on January 1, 1998.
A congratulatory letter was received by Dick and Jo King dated June 25, 1996, from American Square Dance Magazine. Following a nationwide search, and receiving documentation from Dick and Jo, the magazine declared K8s as the Oldest Square Dance Club in America. The prize for this distinction, aside from being a really cool thing, was a two year subscription to American Square Dance Magazine.
Kilowatt Eights also has a rich history of artistically designed flyers and posters promoting their dances through the years. A sampling of these is below. Sorry they are not in color.
The 2000s saw change, some of it very difficult change, in K8s. Jerry Tuffield was asked to step down as club cuer. The club has hired cuers since then. In 2001 K8s extended membership invitations to members of the disbanding Levi & Laces Square Dance Club. On January 22, 2002, Charlie Tuffield graduated his last square dance class with K8s. For in the spring of 2002 a division of music preference (old vs new) among club members culminated with the resignation of Charlie Tuffield as club caller; thus ending his 42 year club caller tenure with K8s. Many club members left as well but the club continued on. In 2004, the More Squares Square Dance Club disbanded and its members were encouraged to join K8s. Both the 65th and 70th anniversary dances, in 2004 and 2009, had Dave Guille and Bob Lyon as caller/cuer. In 2007 K8s decided to make square dance lessons more of a priority, which they had not been since the departure of Charlie T. in 2002.
Early in 2011 club presidents Ron & Karen Dreher were again concerned about dwindling membership numbers. Through diligent research by them and others, they came to the realization that the clubs that had club callers were thriving and those without club callers were having a more difficult time. Ron consulted with Bear Miller, asking if he knew of any new callers that would be available to become K8s’ club caller. Bear ID’d one caller that was returning after a 20 plus year hiatus from calling. After listening and dancing to this gentleman for a number of months, K8s’ members vote him OK! In late 2011 K8s extended an offer to Bill Heiny to become their club caller. Bill accepted their offer but due to contractual obligations he would not officially be designated as club caller until January 3, 2014. Bill did, however, begin Wednesday night square dance lessons beginning in September of 2012. He did also call a few dances during 2012.
We were not acquainted with Bill Heiny as a caller until the spring of this year but have found him to be a delight to dance to. Good choice Kilowatt Eights!
Whew! It’s hard not be long winded. We know it’s not all here and our apologies for those folks not mentioned or those not portrayed. It has been our distinct pleasure to compile this ultra-condensed history of the Kilowatt Eights Square Dance Club. We are deeply indebted to Ron and Karen Dreher for their sharing of voluminous pages of text and images on the history of K8s.
And again, as Your Council Historians we will endeavor to seek out those callers, those dancers, those communities, those events, those writings and images of the past that may enrich our own experiences as square dancers today.
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We came across a 1960 interview1 of Jimmy Clossin, a long-time square dance teacher, author and caller from Texas. The 1920s saw him start his teaching career at Texas Technological College, with thirteen years of classes in square dancing. Jimmy also began to teach square dancing on the west coast and began teachers’ courses and recreational institutes in 1937. During this period, his largest class of beginner square dancers was 800 strong in San Diego. Beginning in 1948 he taught summer square dance classes at Colorado State College. His summer teaching would continue for a dozen years, up to the time of the 1960 interview. He claims that his 1938 square dance book ‘Honor your Partner’ was the first of its kind in the modern revival of square dancing. Below are some tidbits and opinions of Jimmy Clossin from the interview:
- The "square through" appeared in Edward Scott's Dancing as an Art and Pastille in 1892.
- In 1858, Elias Howe's Ballroom Handbook used an "Alamo style" figure, though unnamed.
- In 1960, the most pressing problem in today's square dancing, according to Jimmy, is too much new material; dancers, regardless of ability, are exposed to more than they can master. Under these circumstances, square dancing cannot serve its recreational function.
- From the midst of his extensive collection of square dance books, recordings, and hand-drawn analyses of square dance patterns and figures, Jimmy Clossin gave a final admonition to callers and teachers to pay more attention to the 90 per cent of participants who use square dancing as recreation, and less attention to the 5-10 per cent who become dancing fanatics.
Moving on, here are some more square dance history happenings. Did you know?
- The founding of the Aggie Haylofter Square Dance Club was in 1947 under direction of Jim McCaskill. The objective of the club was to create interest in square dancing among the college students and to foster a group to represent Colorado A & M College at various square and folk dance events.
- The 15th Annual Festival of the Texas State Federation of Square & Round Dancers was held June 2-5, 1977. The location was the Astrohall, next to the now defunct Astrodome. I (Griz) actually saw Nolan Ryan pitch for the Astros in the early 1980s.
- The November 1980 DAS&RDC Bulletin listed 64 square and round dance clubs in the council. Oh, the bulletin was 45 cents a copy.
- Also announced in the November 1980 Bulletin was the merger of the Centennial Squares, Cloudstompers and Columbine Stars square dance clubs. They would begin dancing at the Wheat Ridge Grange on November 22nd.
- On September 8, 1991, eleven couples from the Polka Dot Square Dance Club attended a matinee performance of Oklahoma at the Country Dinner Playhouse. I remember that place. The Playhouse was abruptly shuttered on May 22, 2007 during a run of “Evita.” It was demolished in January of 2011.
- In western country slang, a “Foofaraw” is a fancy dress.
- The gestation period of a moose is 246 days.
As always, we endeavor, as Your Council Historians, to seek out those callers, dancers, communities, events, writings and images of the past that may enrich our own experiences as square dancers today. See you in a square soon.
1 Gray, Miriam, FOCUS ON DANCE 1, 1960. The American Association For Health, Physical Education and Recreation, A Department of the National Education Association 1201 16th Street, N.W. Washington 6
A Square Dance Pioneer: Jimmy Clossin: Biography of a Pioneer.
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DAS&RDC Historical Report A Blast from the Past #16 aka History Corner
By Griz & Senda Casada Griswold
WHEN YOU DANCE IN A SQUARE YOU MAKE A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
We thought we would start you out this month with some more square dance trivia questions. And so that you have ample time to research the answers, the answers will be in next month’s bulletin. Here you go;
Question 1: Who was the first square dance record producer?
Question 2: Who was the first caller to be recorded?
Question 3: Did the Brady Bunch ever square dance?
Question 4: What Paule Shore movie had square dancing? Can you name the caller?
Question 5: How many movies can you name with Square Dance in the title?
Question 6: Who on the TV show Tool Time was learning to be a square dance caller?
Square dancing was once much more thoroughly engrained in American culture. How do we know this without looking at numbers and statistics? Marketing, that’s how. 50, 60, and 70 plus years ago, major companies used, referred to, alluded to, square dancing in their ad copy. Some of the products, that we assume were popular amongst square dancers of the day, are still going strong today. Coke, Tide detergent, and Ford automobiles are but a few of the products advertised with a square dance theme.
America has always had music and dance to remind of us of history. Take a look at history: We danced when Lindbergh did his trans-Atlantic flight (Lindy-hop which later became known as the Jitterbug), American Bandstand/The Dick Clark Show was a weekly show featuring dance. By 1960 Chubby Checker made the Twist the most popular dance in the world. If you take a look at dancing, you see we dance when we are dating, at weddings, at the harvest of the crops, at the end of a war, theatrical productions, religious holidays, and special occasions. It will take lots of teamwork to reawaken the public's interest in square dancing. Music and dancing should be a part of everyone's life.
Please visit our state website for information regarding dancing opportunities around town and our state. The site will also link you to the festival site where you can register for the 2016 festival. www.Coloradosquaredance.com
As always, we endeavor, as Your Council Historians, to seek out those callers, dancers, communities, events, writings and images of the past that may enrich our own experiences as square dancers today. See you in a square soon.
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DASRDC History Report
By Griz & Senda Casada Griswold
A Blast from the Past #17 aka History Corner
WHEN YOU DANCE IN A SQUARE YOU MAKE A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
We know that you have been dying to get the answers to the trivia questions from last month’s history report, so here you are;
Question 1: Who was the first square dance record producer?
Question 2: Who was the first caller to be recorded?
Answer 1&2: At the request of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison recorded Benjamin Lovett calling square dances. Mr. Ford wanted the recordings to be used in school programs across the United States.
Question 3: Did the Brady Bunch ever square dance?
Answer 3: Yes, in their living room. (Episode #80)
Question 4: What Paule Shore movie had square dancing? Can you name the caller?
Answer 4: The Son-In Law. Ernie Kinney
Question 5: How many movies can you name with Square Dance in the title?
Answer 5: Square Dance Katy (1950), Square Dance (1987)
Question 6: Who on the TV show Tool Time was learning to be a square dance caller?
Answer 6: Al was taking a home correspondence course in square dance calling.
The word clodhopper is thought to have come into the English language as a 1690s slang, "one who works on plowed land, a rustic," from the noun clod and the verb hop. In a sense the word was similar to clod-breaker or clod-crusher; and perhaps a play on grasshopper. Basically, it was a rather derogatory term for a farmer. By 1836 the term was extended to include the shoes worn by such workers and since taken on the meaning of the negative footwear of my youth. I remember using the word clodhopper, referring the big ugly corrective shoes that my folks forced me to wear when I (Griz) was a youngster.
I had not thought of the word clodhopper for many decades until coming across a serial article from Square Dance Magazine that ran from December 1971 to April 1972 entitled “The Clodhopper Dance” (http://squaredancehistory.org/files/original/756ee4df2fbd0a5de09035a981ffe373.pdf”
Robert Lee Cook wrote that the clodhoppers, or farmers dance has not historically received adequate credit for its contribution to our modern western square dancing. Following are excerpts from his well-done article.
“I have called the western square dance a "farmer's dance" and, since its story is very complex, I'd like to say a few things about the unromantic and unsung backbone of our whole Western culture.
“The farmer lacked the rebelliousness of those first hippies, the trappers. His daily crises were neither as spectacular nor as dramatic as those of the covered wagon pioneer, the railroader, or the cowboy. His backbreaking efforts to exact successful crops from often unproductive soil had none of the glamour of the equally backbreaking efforts of the miners to find mineral riches, although the farmer often was much more of a gambler. He and his daughters have been the butts of countless bad jokes and ridicule of a sort that has never been told on the miners, cowboys, trappers or anyone else western—except perhaps the western traveling salesman. This poor clodhopper farmer—conforming, quiet, imperturbable, conservative, hardworking, unimaginative, all-suffering—is the absolute opposite of everything romantic and flamboyant that we most admire and glorify in the Old West. And yet I can without qualification state my firm belief that, without this man and his kind, there could never have been a western United States and there would today be no square dance as we know it, or have ever known it.
“When the first agriculturalists began to poke tentative plows into the dry soils of the West in 1860, the American dance was still almost totally a European dance. New infusions of the most recent fashionable continental dances came into both the east and west coasts, of course, even getting to Denver and other inland centers, but the farmer remained unaware of these, living as he did in dogged isolation, bedeviled as he was by the horrors of western dry land farming. He had the old dances he had brought with him, and he danced those well. He borrowed freely from the dances of his Swedish, Swiss, German, or Russian neighbors. When stumped, he invented; when he invented, he refined; when he refined, he experimented with variations, innovative patterns, and unorthodox ideas. While a lot of the dancing done on the Frontier between I860 and 1900 was choking itself to death on brittle formalism, the Clodhopper Dance evolved, flowered, and burned brilliantly in a constantly changing kaleidoscope of joyousness and invention.
“The clodhopper dance, changing and yet changeless, turned out to be the true American Dance, an amalgam of all the origins of all the people who had brought their dances to this continent. Rivulets ran west from New England, Appalachia, the Atlantic states; ran from Canadians in the north and Mexicans in the south; with new immigrants ran in from Germany, Sweden, Russia, Italy; rode in from Texas, rebounded from Utah and California; was swept in and mixed and adapted to the rhythms of the clodhopper life and needs until it formed a great reservoir of western dance which would survive to the middle of our century, now ebbing, now flowing, but always vigorous and rhythmic and uniquely our own.”
Please spread the word to get your own Denver Bulletin and also visit our state website for information regarding dancing opportunities around town and our state. The site will also link you to the festival site where you can register for the 2016 festival. www.Coloradosquaredance.com
As always, we endeavor, as Your Council Historians, to seek out those callers, dancers, communities, events, writings and images of the past that may enrich our own experiences as square dancers today. See you in a square soon.
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