As a teenager, growing up in depression-era Alliance, Nebraska, his mother insisted he learn how to dance. His instructor was the daughter of the local banker. On Saturday afternoons he would go to their house and for 25 cents she would give him a lesson.
He told us how in the late 1930s he and his buddies would drive two hours to a dance hall on Saturday night and then two hours home after midnight. Mentioning that he'd heard all the Big Bands play he lamented that the dance hall was probably long gone.
Turns out that after asking him some details on location, we were able, thanks to the miracle of the internet, to find the dance hall and learned to our surprise it is still standing!
Sandford Hall in Mitchell, Nebraska is located at the Scotts Bluff County Fairgrounds and been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1997.
Sandford Hall was built in 1934, replacing the Mitchell Dance Hall Pavilion which burned down in January of that year. 1934 was a very tough year in the Nebraska Panhandle; not only was the Depression in full swing but it was the first year of the Dust Bowl sweeping across the Great Plains. The Panhandle was big, lonely country. Take Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, west of Worcester, and then remove 4.9 million of the 5 million inhabitants in the area and you've got the Panhandle, with its biggest towns in 1940 being Scottsbluff (12,000) and Alliance (6,000). In 2019 the Panhandle's population is down to about 85,000.
Thankfully, JL Sandford, one of the owners of the First National Bank in Mitchell, was able to arrange a line of credit to finance the new building (and have it named after him!). The dance floor in the new building was made of hardwood and measured 120'x50'.
And just as my father in law remembered, many of the famous big bands played there, hosted by the American Legion, including Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Harry James, Artie Shaw, and Lawrence Welk. In those days the bands toured nationally by bus. There was no interstate highway system so traveling took much longer and Mitchell and Scotts Bluff was a natural overnight stop between Denver and Omaha. Mitchell's population was only 2,000 but the bands often drew more than 1,000 people to their shows as folks like my father in law and his friends would drive hours to get there.
Today, the recently renovated hall is still used for events ranging from dog shows to weddings.
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