Dances at Jeanne & Don’s in the 1950s

Supplement #1 to an initial post – Stokes Bay Photos and Memories from Jack Bertrand

One activity I remember fondly were the dances at Jeanne & Don’s in the 1950s,  which brought the community together on a regular basis in the summers:  The dances were a regular social activity for one and all, held Wednesdays and Saturdays from, I think, 9pm to midnight at the Restaurant/Dance Hall. The Saturday dances had to end at midnight, as religion-inspired Blue Laws (which apparently weren’t rescinded until the 1990s) prevented most commercial activities on Sundays!  Some holiday long-weekends, though, there would be a dance which started at midnight Sunday (legally Monday).  

I didn’t really appreciate it until much later, but imagine a dance where both you and your parents could be participating and both were having a good time.  I did take some dates there, but most of the time we just went individually. And there were always interesting people of the same age (or not) to dance with. The usual band had maybe 4 or 5 members and though not local, they were from the peninsula.  As I hazily recall, there was a piano player and a fiddle player, maybe a bass, not sure about others. Their repertoire was to play older and current popular and country music, interspersed with 2 sets of traditional square dances during the evening. The latter were in many ways the most fun.  Everybody really got into it. Seems like the quality of the music was usually pretty good.

My friends and I had a ritual, before the dances, to take a late-in-the day swim to clean up for the dance. Sometimes it was out at the Government Dock and sometimes it was out at the sandbar off the channel just outside the mouth of the river.  Others had other rituals, often including a fair bit of booze.  There would always be some “wasted” older teens and young adults around. But usually they didn’t constitute a real problem (their driving home, though, may have).  There were just a few times when things almost came to blows. And I expect there may have been times when I wasn’t there, that they did. But I never witnessed any of it. The dances were a pretty safe, as well as a fun, activity for most people.

Also, the Dance Hall was a place where we teens could spend some time on lazy afternoons. There was a jukebox (with 45rpm records) and a pinball machine (which we would lift the front on to our shoes to gain an advantage). But often we just hung out and talked. Jeanne didn’t seem to mind.