Learning To Dance

I remember when I was in the sixth grade at Barrick Elementary we learned to dance. The lessons were taught during the weeks leading up to the May Fete when the school would put on a festival including the May Pole. These lessons were 1955-56 time frame and I don’t think any of the students had ever danced before, I know I had not. Barrick was not an old school, but it had been built totally out of wood and on concrete blocks. The main building had the offices and the auditorium that was also the lunch room with the kitchen behind the stage. That room was used for everything done indoors. All of the floors were wood even in the kitchen cooking area. All of the Barrick School was replaced a few years later with a permanent building.

I believe the dance lessons were during the time when we would normally have the gym period, although that term was not used back then because we had no gym room. We would learn to dance to different kinds of music and different types of dancing, but much of it was square dancing. At that age, I think I hated dancing, a boy with two left feet trying to dance with a girl and was afraid of stepping on her feet. Well, we got graded on the process, not on how good we could dance but on our attitude so I did my best. I actually think I started to get better and began to like the lesson period. As the kids learned more of the different moves of square dancing that matched up with the songs (calls), many times we would break out with laughter. I was a very shy boy and those dancing periods help me to get to be more open and would talk to more kids, even girls.

The process that the teachers used from the start to match dance partners were to have all of the boys form a line by their height and the girls, another line in the same way.  That way they could have the boy/girl teams of the same heights. There was a little girl named Carolyn Ihlo that had long black hair that would be done with curls and she was so pretty. She was about my height and I would look at the two lines and try to figure out how tall I needed to look to match up with her. The teachers would move the boys and girls to the spots they needed to be to match. Not once did I get matched to Carolyn.

I learned to dance with the same girl every time for all of the dancing periods. We actually learned to dance pretty well together, but I always wanted to dance with Carolyn at least once. That girl I learned to dance with was a girl named Eva Lou Allen. Many years later, in 1964 we would get married and have fifty-eight years together. Now you know the rest of the story.