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| Lakeside Ballroom, built 1927 in Guttenberg, Iowa |
I recently took a trip up the Great River Road, spending most of my time in Northeast Iowa and along the river in Wisconsin and thought I'd write about the somewhat buried history of social dancing that remains in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. I'm using Guttenberg, Iowa, where part of my family has been based for over a century, as a focal point to shed some light on dancing and music as recreation in the jazz and big band eras of small town Northeast Iowa. As it turns out, the sleepy, inconspicuous towns that speckle the upper banks of Big Muddy once boomed with the popular rhythms of the time.
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| Plagman's Barn in Garber, Iowa. garberiowa.com |
If you lived in the river town of Guttenberg, Iowa in the early to mid-1920s you probably did most of your social dancing at small community events at places such as Turner Hall (operated by the Turnverien, an essential social aspect of any early German-American community), which featured a wooden floor for roller skating, dance and social parties, and sports games. After 1925, local business owners were constructing venues specifically for dancing up and down the upper Mississippi River. Near Garber, a town about ten miles west of Guttenberg and with a population of about 189 in 1920, the large Plagman's (pronounced Ploughman's) Barn was constructed in the mid-1920s for social dances and meetings. Quickly following, William H. Kann and Sons, who ran a manufacturing business in Guttenberg and held a deep-seated passion for music, built Lakeside Ballroom, at that time known as Lakeside Pavilion, in 1927 on the north side of town. The venue featured a 50' by 160' dance floor and quickly became a dancing hotspot for miles around, in the early days only between Easter and Thanksgiving, and after 1935 all year-round under the ownership of Morley and Eberhard, who added an extension for a bar.
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Lakeside in 1928. The name of the venue was written across
the roof to provide an aerial marker, which at that time aviators
such as Lindbergh relied upon. Photo from
www.iowaballroom.com |
The bands hired at Lakeside fit the musical and dancing preferences of this nearly 100% German-American town, which also boated in guests from Prairie Du Chein, Cassville, and other communities on both sides of the river. Visitors from as far as Chicago came to dance to bands like Wayne King, Ted Weems, Paul Whiteman, Art Kassell, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, Vincent Lopez, Zez Confrey, Herbie Kay and many other regional and national groups. The dances being done included the foxtrot, waltz, schottische, and polkas. Surely, some form of the jitterbug would have been done in the late 1930s and early 1940s as per the national trends. Many of these bands would be considered dance orchestras, as opposed to jazz bands, or "hot" bands, although sometimes groups like The Coon-Sanders Nighthawks and Jesse Stone and His Blue Serenaders (both from Kansas City) appeared at Lakeside too. In the handful of Guttenberg Press newspapers I looked at from 1932, Herbie Kay and Wayne King, "The Waltz King," Ted Weems, and Vincent Lopez were the band leaders who made front page news for their popularity at Lakeside. More
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Lakeside's maple floor, which has withstood several
floods. 2008. |
than 1500 attendees from across the region were reported at Wayne King's Tuesday night engagement. The population of Guttenberg at that time would have been about 1800, which clarifies Lakeside's role as a dance and music epicenter for small river towns for miles around. You can be sure that "Whoopee" John Wilfahrt's polka band, whom Lakeside advertised in the Press for a May 17, 1932 show, also drew a big crowd from this working class community of German immigrants and their descendants. Admission cost 25c at this show, although other featured acts cost $1.50/couple and 25c for an extra lady.
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Poster for a wedding party at Lakeside,
May 1934, featuring local band The Jolly Ridge
Hillbillies, named after a hilltop road south of
Guttenberg. |
While the Lakeside Ballroom was almost certainly one of the finest dance venues in Northeastern Iowa, it was by no means the only place to dance in the area, or even in Guttenberg. Special events were held at the Fairgrounds Pavilion in National, Iowa, which is about about ten or twenty miles north of G-berg. Dubuque, the nearest big city, had a ballroom of its own called Melody Mill. And of course, the Mississippi River, a primary source of many of these communities' initial and longterm economic success, had always been a key component of the residents' recreation. Even the smallest river towns were touched by the floating palaces that into the early 20th century were as inseparable from river life as the water itself. One advertisement from July 28, 1932 for a Venetian Nights Water Carnival in Lansing, Iowa also featured a dance on the Manitou, a barge and showboat based in McGregor, Iowa, with music by the 9-piece Manitou Orchestra. In a picture that my dad excavated from his grandfather's garage (hence the poor condition), the Manitou is pictured, towed by a steamboat, which pushed it up and down the river.
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The "floating palace" Manitou, probably in Red Wing, Minnesota
during the 1910s. A rare photo provided by Gary Frommelt. |
A Streckfus steamer, the St. Louis-based Capitol, was also advertised frequently in the Guttenberg Press in the year 1932. The Capitol took day and moonlight cruises out of Dubuque and Guttenberg, Iowa and Cassville, Wisconsin (the nearest river town to Guttenberg on the Wisconsin side). One cruise on June 25, held by the Rotary and Juliette Lowe Clubs, was a benefit for the boy and girl scouts of Guttenburg and featured the dance orchestra of Tony Catalano and His Commanders. The Press wrote the following week that because of the success of the cruise another one had been scheduled for July.
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An ad for one of the Streckfus Steamers, the Capitol.
Provided by Gary Frommelt. |
The floating palaces have long been removed from the communities that once enjoyed their luxurious accommodations and top-notch entertainment, leaving hardly a trace, notwithstanding their place in the heritage of the Mississippi River Valley. In many cases, attempts to revitalize existing boats' splendor ended in failure due to a lack of required riverboat knowledge on the part of scheming businessmen. Some dancing and music venues, such as Lakeside and Plagman's Barn, have managed to creatively repurpose themselves to stay in business. Lakeside still features country, rock, and occasionally big bands, but survives on food and drink sales in their sports bar. The North East Iowa Farm and Antique Association has developed Plagman's Barn as a regional venue for showcasing antique machinery at events like Show Days, which still allow music and dancing to take place there. One of the main reasons I have become so interested in this under-the-radar heritage that remains literally hidden in the woodwork, is the collective lack of interest I have encountered. Hopefully we can begin to enlighten the river valley and beyond about this hotbed of culture that once existed and to which so many of us are mysteriously connected.
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