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Three Thousand Guests Flock In For Barn Dance ________ Singleton Ranch Party Draws Visitors From Both Near and Far. ________
BY GENE COOPER MOUNTAIN PEAK, Ellis Co., Texas, Sept. 4. -- Three thousand pairs of boots and slippers stomped out square dances and reels for hours Friday night on a barn loft floor as big as a small pasture on the Singleton ranch, a mile from here. Marvin Singleton, sometimes of St. Louis, paid the fiddlers. It was a party that completely got out of hand before starting time, for the Singleton ranchers, expecting a few hundred guests, were completely taken by surprise, as arriving guests began to stop their cars half a mile back the road, finding no room to park in a thirty-acre pasture that had been set aside for that use. But there was a subforeman at the gate with a flashlight to point the way, crying, "Glad to have you," even as stragglers continued to come in up until nearly midnight. All Kinds of Cars. Sedans from Dallas and Fort Worth, Waxahachie and Cleburne, stood alongside less shiny cars that an hour or so earlier, had been used to take cotton pickers into a dozen different towns near here for the night. It was hardly dark when Frank Erwin, ranch manager, formerly of Dallas, showed up at the head of the long outside stairs leading to the loft and said: "There's a pasture full of Model T Fords out back of the barn. It must be time for the dance. Strike up the band." A few hundred hadn't waited for the music to file into the dance loft, but with a snappy strain the dancers increased. The stairway filled and a line of others, waiting to get in, stretched back half across the lot on this ranch where, when they say "the chickens" they mean 20,000, or "the cattle," they mean a good many hundreds. Until far into the night that waiting line was never shorter than a city block. Upstairs the dance began. Old-Time Square Dance. "Balance, all," cried out Beanie Robertson, Fort Worth's pride as a square dance caller, and fours of couples stepped out. "Corner swing. Right to your partner and grind it, right and left." Satin dance pumps and hobnailed field shoes thumped alongside, and nobody noticed. "Partner, once and a half and promenade all," sang out the caller, and, as fiddles and guitars strummed the time the dancers whirled. Hard hands that had punched ties at a cotton gin met soft hands that had held nothing rougher than bridge cards. Girls' hands that were roughed from sharp cotton burrs clasped a surgeon's long, smooth fingers. And nobody noticed. "Promenade All." "Grab that gal with the rundown shoes. And promenade all; do, si, do," the caller sang. Downstairs half a dozen barrels of lemonade vanished in an hour. The king and the duke who rode down the river on Huck Finn's raft could have taken a soda pop concession and paid off the war debt. In a corner, nursing a sore foot, was the genial host, Marvin Singleton. He watched the dancers swirl past. "I can't tonight," he complained, "but when I was younger, just a few years back, well, I could buck and wing with the best of the boys." |
