The Dog and Other Memories

Digging back into my journal for this week's idea, I came upon an entry that brings back some happy memories of those wonderful teenage days. Once again I remind you that many of the names were changed since I did not seek permission to include them in my writings. I take you back to this week in 1964 and some of the thoughts about those days.

Written in my journal in 1964:

Wednesday, April 8, 1964

99th Day -267 days to follow

Clear

The trial's going along nicely.  It's a simulated divorce case where Mary Ann B. is divorcing Pete F.  Stayed at school till 5:00 P.M. almost, working on the Senior Banquet programs with Gene B. and Cynthia D.  Sixth period I went out after ads with Dag, Mary Jean, Ann A., and Sarajane.  Gene's mother brought me home.

Watched T.V. till 6:30 P.M. when Robert came and picked me up.  We went down to the Naval Reserve for a dance team practice for the dance tomorrow night.  Got home at 8:45 P.M.  Called Grandmother and she brought me two cheeseburgers home for supper.  Tried on my white sports coat to see if I can wear it to the prom.  Wrote a letter to Mother and sent her the list of my graduation expenses, $24.96.

Studied for a stupid "fizzicks" test while I watched "Here Comes the Waves."  When it's over I'm a gonna go to bed.  I'ze tard is cauze why.

Reflected thoughts 25 years later, in 1989:

Staying after school was usually a punishment and rarely done because you wanted to do so.  It was the approved and accepted sentence for a violation of school policy, usually imposed on those who were late for school.  If you got there late, you went home late.  It made sense.  Very rarely did anyone stay after school because they wanted to do extra school work.  There was not a lot of punishment given out to the students at Lee.  Corporal punishment was just about completely done away with; however, there were still a few licks given out by the football coach.  He was the selected executioner of corporal punishment when it did have to be administered.  If any of the female teachers had disciplinary problems with any of their male students, then the offender was sent to the coach, and he was the one with the paddle.

Even I had felt the blow of the coach's paddle.  I was caught roughhousing in the halls with some friends when I was in the tenth grade and got two licks in return.  The embarrassment was worse than the pain.  It was almost funny, but having been on the opposite end of the coach's paddle increased my social status at school.  Those who considered me a fruit saw that I was more normal than I was given credit for.  Spankings were reserved for semi-major offenses and staying after school or staying in the principal's office during morning break or after lunch was used for minor infractions.  The worst offenders, those who insisted on breaking major and not minor rules, were given three-day suspensions from school.  Those were very rare.  There were never any real problems in school that took much more action than that.  We didn't have any rapes, or shootings or cuttings, or drug deals that could fill the pages of the paper.

That day, staying after school was voluntary, to help get ready for the senior banquet, the first of the upcoming major senior activities.  Being a part of the journalism staff and knowing the ins and outs of printing and the mimeograph machine, I lent my talents to that cause.  The senior class was trying to make a big deal out of the banquet.  It was going to be as big a deal as you could make it using crepe paper in the school lunchroom.  We had to do it all from scratch.  Lee had never had a senior banquet before, so there were no grounds on which to build.  The whole event was on virgin territory, and each piece of the puzzle had to be cut to fit.  Time was running out though, for the banquet was scheduled for the upcoming Friday.

The after-school television I enjoyed as a seventeen-year-old usually still included "American Bandstand," if there were no good movies being shown.  Dick Clark and his show became popular for me when I first discovered girls.  Music didn't play much of a part of my life before the girl part of music came along.  Once girls were discovered, then the music was a whole lot more important.  It was about the eighth grade when I first started watching it regularly.  That was 1959, and in the height of classic rock-and-roll.  Along with the fast songs, there were some very romantic slow ones too.  It was then that songs like "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" by the Platters and "All I Have To Do Is Dream" by the Everly Brothers gave me a chance to hold a girl close.  Being a slow bloomer in the art of dating, and very shy when it came to being around girls, I needed a good excuse to get that close to them.

It was about that time that I found out that a slow song required that you not only get close to a girl, but actually had to touch them in the process.  My first attempts at slow dancing was the two-step, "one-two-one," "one-two-one."  It was very regimented and with it you didn't really get to touch your partner very much.  You held one of her hands in your own and put your other hand on her waist.  In the early dance days, that was all that touched.  You didn't even get to enjoy it.  You were too busy counting the steps to even know, let along enjoy, your body touching the body of a cute girl.  Eventually, I decided that I needed to learn to dance better.

I was too embarrassed to ask anyone to teach me, so I used the same technique that has made "Sesame Street" such a success.  I used the television.  My contemporaries and I turned to "American Bandstand" to teach us the dancefloor skills we needed.  Dancing was hard in those days.  Dances had names, and they had steps, and you had to know the names and you had to know the steps if you were going to get out on the dance floor.  To make things worse, by the time you finally got comfortable with one dance and had mastered all the steps, then a new dance craze came along, and the training started all over again.  Dances like the Twist, the Pony, the Watusi, the Swim, and the Fly, all circulated through the in-circles.  With each name was a new mixture of steps that accompanied it and a whole new dancing process.

"Dirty Dancing" was a big hit in the movie.  Patrick Swazy turned the world's head in his portrayal of a dance instructor in a New England summer camp who danced "dirty."  The new generation was surprised to think that their parents ever danced at all, much less danced like that.  Dirty dancing arrived in Huntsville in 1963.  It was not as sleazy as in the movie, but we loved it.  The song that brought it to the sleepy little town of Huntsville was sung by Rufus Thomas of Memphis fame.  It was called "The Dog."  We didn't learn how to dance to "The Dog" by watching "American Bandstand."  In the Sixties, "AB" was a clean-cut show where boys wore coats and ties and girls wore respectable church-type dresses.  Any suggestive dancing would have been barred from the screen.  I remember when the hit song "Tequila" was first performed on "American Bandstand" in 1958, and the Champs had to change the words to "Co-cola," because tequila was an alcoholic drink and it didn't fit the image of the all-American kid who watched "AB."  Instead of being learned from television, the moves to "The Dog" were spread by small pockets of insurgent groups who learned it somewhere and others learned by watching them.

"The Dog" was the first dance that I can remember being banned from a dance floor.  I first saw it performed at the VFW club on a visit to Memphis.  The chaperones of the dance stayed busy that night trying to prevent the dancers from engaging in the "lewd and licentious" dance.  I watched it enough to be one of the first to take the steps back to Huntsville.  Like the spreading of a dirty joke or the real words to "Louie, Louie," the steps were arriving from all quarters and infecting the places that sponsored dances.  The Dog was not allowed on the dance floor, officially.  It was still performed, however, thanks to groups of teenage dancers who crowded around and formed a circle while the dancers got to do their moves inside the circle.

One of my early favorite dance partners was Mary, who was on that night still in the hospital recovering from an auto accident.  I had several others who shared the dance with me too, but she was the best partner I ever shared that dance with.  She seemed to have a zest or gift for it.  Perhaps it appealed to her because it was risqué.  There was really only one part of the dance that could have ever been considered dirty, and in fact, it probably was.  The dance had relatively simple steps which were usually performed with the male and female partners facing each other, separated by a couple of feet of space.  At a key moment, usually selected by the girl; she would spin around and lean forward a little while her male partner would move in putting his right hand on her right shoulder and then his left hand on her left shoulder.  Once those contacts were made, then the dirty part took place, consisting of "suggestive" moves by the two of them.  It was from this part of the dance that the name was coined, for it looked like two dogs in the backyard doing what dogs would do in the backyard.  The only thing missing was the bucket of cold water to break them up.  A few beats of that step, and the girl would spin around again and the dance would go back into the clean part.  It was an exciting and uninhibited dance to perform.

For many "Bible beaters" of the Bible Belt, that was too crude and much too suggestive to be considered healthy.  Try as they might though, they couldn't stop it from taking place on the dance floor.  Little did they know, all that was needed was a little time, and "The Dog" would be replaced by the next dance that would come along.  Songs and dances were like that.  They could only endure for a short while until something new pushed them aside.  The songs have lasted much longer than the dances.  The songs stay alive in the minds of the people who lived them, but the bodies can no longer perform the same as they did those many years ago.

The Wayback Machine

Rufus C. Thomas, Jr. (March 26, 1917 – December 15, 2001) was an American rhythm-and-blues, funk, soul and blues singer, songwriter, dancer, DJ and comic entertainer from Memphis, Tennessee. He recorded for several labels, including Chess Records and Sun Records in the 1950s, before becoming established in the 1960s and 1970s at Stax Records. His dance records, including "Walking the Dog" (1963), "Do the Funky Chicken" (1969), and "(Do the) Push and Pull" (1970), were some of his most successful songs.

He had his own hit with "The Dog", a song he had originally improvised in performance based on a Willie Mitchell bass line, complete with imitations of a barking dog. The 1963 follow-up, "Walking the Dog", engineered by Tom Dowd of Atlantic, became one of his most successful records, reaching #10 on the Billboard pop chart.

Until someone starts a revolt and asks me to stop sharing the entries from my book, I will continue to do so when I feel the time is appropriate. I am still asking for comments using the form below.

This week I send out a special "Thank You" to Delores Kilgore, who faithfully acknowledges receipt of the Traveller each week. It is nice to have someone who responds each week.

 SAVE THE DATE!

 LEE LUNCH BUNCH

CLASSES OF ’64, ’65, ‘66

THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2024

11:00 A.M.

LOGAN’S ROADHOUSE

4249 BALMORAL DR. SW

HUNTSVILLE, AL 35801

(256) 881-0584

Please save the date for our next lunch gathering in April. We will be meeting back at our old place, Logan’s Roadhouse. We all enjoyed the change of location last year to Carrabba’s, but they were getting a bit difficult to work with. There are just precious few restaurants that are willing to let a sizable group reserve a private space, if they have one, without paying a large fee. As long as we have an acceptable number of lunch guests, Logan’s will not charge us that fee. So, it is necessary for you to let me know if you plan to come so I can keep up with the number. As always, I will need to call the restaurant by noon the day before to let them know an accurate number of guests. We cannot go over that allowed number. We have always been well received at Logan’s, and they have a menu that appeals to most everyone.

Hope to see all of our regulars plus any of our group that has not been able to come before. Thanks and looking forward to seeing you soon!

Patsy Hughes Oldroyd ‘65

keithandpatsy@att.net

H (256) 232-7583

C (256) 431-3396   or on Facebook

Last Week's Questions, Answers, 

And Comments

Craig Bannecke, LHS '65, "REMEMBERING EASTER - Tommy, I enjoyed reading your Easter article and it made me stop and ponder back to my early high school days, the Easter Services I and my family attended. As a youth, my family attended Saint Marks Lutheran Church with several other Lee High classmates and friends. Since we lived in Lakewood in Northwest Huntsville I remember the long drives each Sunday across town to attend Church. Other Lakewood families like Jim and Nancy Harris, Sarah and Sandra Schiff, and Beth McNabb attended Saint Marks. Plus there were several German space scientists' families children who attended Lee and a number who attended Huntsville High School. Since Lutherans were considered " High Church" by most Southern traditional protestant churches for its formality and processional entry into the sanctuary there was always a sense of reverence as the Pastor and choir marched into the sanctuary to start the service. The Easter services were particularly beautiful and gave such a sense of worship as the choir sang during their entry.

One interesting thing I learned about Saint Marks that I did not know till reading a comment about the Church on Facebook, Huntsville Revisited is that the 118 German Space Scientists that were moved to Huntsville by the Army, started the Church. Apparently, at the time there was not a Lutheran Church in Huntsville when they arrived, so they started one and it became Saint Marks. Another remembrance I have of those families is that Saint Marks was the only Church Picnic I ever attended in my 76 years that had beer at the picnic. Those Germans brought great German food to our picnics in Guntersville and were not going to be without their beer either! For Pastor Heart that was never an issue. He recognized their traditions and culture.

One thing I thought about additionally in learning that it was the German Scientists and Wernher von Braun who started our Church was that they were also the ones insistent that the first place the Army moved them after bringing them all over from Germany to Fort Bliss, was they did not like the arid, hot dry climate. So the Army moved them to a small town in North Alabama that was more like the German terrain and mountain areas. So when we think about how Huntsville has become such a high-tech Rocket City and brain trust of the Space Program we can thank our German classmates' families for making that happen! If I have gotten some of these facts reported incorrectly I hope some of our classmates who are more knowledgeable of the facts will post corrections. Our first three LHS graduating classes and their families have contributed significantly to the city of Huntsville's development and to what it has become."