Reading and hearing these words brings back fond memories of driving home late at night.
“And now from Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook, on the Newark-Pompton Turnpike, in the heart of Cedar Grove, New Jersey, comes the music of....”
Reading and hearing these words brings back fond memories of driving home late at night, listening to the car radio with my date after the close of an evening of ballroom dancing many, many years ago. It was a time when music and dancing were the main activity for social gatherings starting in the 1930’s and lasting into the 1960’s.
Here I was in Texas listening to what seemed to me a far off broadcast from New Jersey. It could have been a broadcast from the Rose Room of Boston’s Ritz Carlton Hotel or the Blue Room of New York’s Hotel Lincoln or the Peabody Hotel Skyway Ballroom in Memphis, Tennessee, but my memory seems to cling mainly to the remote broadcast from Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook..
My favorite place in Fort Worth was called the Casino, not a gambling hall but a dance pavilion that was torn down a few decades ago. It was the place where my friends and I spent many hours dancing to the music of the big bands. It had a dance floor of 31,000 square feet and could accommodate 2000 dancers.
With the advent of rock and roll and the high cost of the rock and roll entertainers it became necessary for a larger venue such as stadiums to cover the costs for the new groups. Unfortunately this signaled the demise of the popular dance locales of that time.
It was in early 1970 that the Casino in my hometown was demolished. A friend of mine, Dick McLamore, a retired musician, recalled recently that prior to the demolition of the Casino that on a Sunday afternoon in December, 1970, a popular local band leader rented the Casino for a last dance before it was torn down. McLamore remembered that it was a beautiful warm day as happens in Texas in December. A few members of the leader’s original band came, along with Tex Beneke & Ray McKinley. Many old friends were there, and someone asked one of the dancers if he could dance as well as he did in the old days. He answered, "Yes, I can dance as well as I ever did. It's breathing that I don't manage as well.”
Those nights of dancing still provide my generation with wonderful memories of a bygone era.
And so it is that the third Tuesday of each month at the Longmeadow Senior Center a small group of people get together to listen to recorded music, jazz and swing from the 1930’s to present day renditions of old favorites. The program is called 'Journey to Jazz.' Saul Finestone introduces the music, and members of the group sit back, listen and recall those bygone days as the sounds of jazz and swing fill the room.
Ottilie Griesemer is the only member of our group who actually danced at Frank Daley’s Meadowbrook ballroom when the remote broadcast were going out over the airwaves.
Myles Garrigan remembers dancing to a W.P.A. (Works Project Administration) band from the depression area that performed each Thursday night in MIddlesex County, N. J. It was there that Garrigan says he learned to jitterbug to songs such as In the Mood and Tuxedo Junction. In his nineties Myles can still do a bit of jitterbugging.
Finestone, a native of Boston, remembers a big part of his early life included evenings spent at the Raymor Ballroom dancing to the music of local musicians and some of the traveling name bands. It was at the Raymoar that Finestone first heard Stan Kenton’s progressive jazz.
Lois McGovern who has written a memoir entitled "Soundtracks of a Life" admits that she missed the big band era, but comes to the meetings because of her appreciation of the music. She is a fan of Michael Feinstein, who is an interpreter of, and an anthropologist and archivist for, the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook.
Yes, rock and roll music was responsible for the end of the Big Band Era. I confess, however, that I still prefer the danceable music that once came over the airwaves from the now defunct Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook ballroom on the Pompton-Newark Turnpike.
Betty C. McCann, of Longmeadow, enjoys writing, reading and ballroom dancing.