BARN DANCES

Back in the mid 1940's in late April, one would read there was to be a wedding dance in the Plummer Hall given by Mr. and Mrs. Gust Konickson. The band? Ray Groom and his Orchestra. The boxed advertisement was for Thursday. Another boxed ad was for another dance by the Ray Groom Orchestra on Saturday.

My parents used to go to dances. Mother would paint a line on her leg so it looked like she was wearing stockings. There was a place called Kulseth's, Old Trunks hopes the spelling is right. Along with dancing at the Palm Garden's in town, they also went to the barn dances.

We try to pull the wool over our parent's eyes, (and our sister's too), but the truth be known, common knowledge is one of many of parent' antenna.

Hoping they didn't know about Kulseth's, I casually mentioned late one Sunday afternoon that me and my friends were going to Kluseth's for a dance. WELL! Must have been a rowdy place because the clamps came down.

There were wedding dances and barn dances and tavern dances all around Thief River Falls during my high school years. I learned it was best not to tell them where the dance was because most of the where going to be clamp down-stay home answers. And yes, some of these places were pretty wild.

I remember one night we went to Red Lake Falls to a dance in the fire hall. The dance floor was up stairs. Two girls I knew got into a horrible fight and one got thrown down the stairs.

The dances at Highlanding were honest to goodness get drunk sort of places and if you weren't soaked yourself, it was not pleasant to have an old whiskered drunk trying to hang on you.

I have a great friend named Barb. She had grown up near a place called Four Town. It was a little dip in the road east of Grygla. She grew up there and going to the Hunter's Ball in Four Town was an annual event for her and her parents. Barb tried to convince my parents that although all the deer hunters were probably drunk, they were harmless. Guess what? That is another time I was chained up. Daddy said I didn't know how to handle myself around that sort of atmosphere. I could learn was not the right answer.

A great place to dance the polka was at the hall in Plummer. They had a grand floor and Barb and I could circumnavigate it numerous of times while the band of fiddles and accordions OOOMPAHED away. We didn't shuffle like the old people did. We always had enough energy to come back to TRF and have a burger at Kief's before going home.

My grand uncles sang in a quartet. How good they were, is unknown. My uncle Harry had a great voice and sang on records with an orchestra. They made a record for Mother for her birthday one year. Harry sang harmony to In My Adobe Hacienda.

In an on line group I have been part of for greater than a decade, one of the women was saying she had been to a concert in New York and heard Sir Paul sing and was in Beatlemania mode after seeing and hearing him. Funny how when she mentioned it, I thought back to their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Yet, when I think about live bands, I think about the barn dances and the fiddles and the polkas. I managed only twice to convince my parents that Maple Lake, a Sunday night hang out for teens was an okay place to go. Make that once, the other time we were supposed to be in Bemidji.

I recently met with some ladies from my high school. Before I went I was browsing the 1962 year book and ran across something that made me smile. Tim had written, "Your pretty lucky, you got to get me to dance the twist at Maple Lake". Who knows if Johnny and the Green men are stilling playing somewhere.

Flash back, what do you see?