Although born out of the Roaring Twenties, dance marathons and walkathons peaked in popularity during the 1930s and the Great Depression.
These competitions featured desperate, unemployed folks shambling around a dance floor or indoor track day after day, week and week, all the while hoping to be the last contestant standing so they could take home the top cash prize.
The public found these events, similar in some ways to reality television today, a form of cheap and occasionally riveting entertainment. Participants, some of whom became local celebrities, lived in a bubble as they danced or walked (and even slept) each and every day before the paying public.
The main draw, of course, was the inherent drama of desperate couples or individuals pitted against each other in a pitiless test of endurance. Writers and social commentators have made much of the parallel between the fatigue and suffering of a nation and its people in the midst of the Great Depression, and the raw and weary spectacle of these marathon contests.
The area’s first dance marathon to garner significant attention took place during the summer of 1928, several months before “Black Tuesday” and the start of the Depression. It was held on the polished hardwood floor of the Bon-Go Park pavilion on the south edge of Bloomington (now G.J. Mecherle Memorial Park, commonly known as State Farm Park).
The event got off to a fitting Jazz Age start on June 22, with a parade of some 25 contestants dancing the several miles from the Courthouse Square to Bon-Go Park. The competition included eight couples from Bloomington and Decatur—four from each community—competing for $325 in prize money (the equivalent of $4,500 today, adjusted for inflation).
Dancers were allowed two hours sleep between 2 and 4 a.m., and 10 minutes of rest each hour. Event organizers also held public dances most evenings from 8 p.m. to midnight, with the George C. Goforth Orchestra of Bloomington providing the music. Those paying the 10 cent admission could thus dance alongside the “marathoners” or simply watch as they dragged themselves to and fro in a half-stupor.
On June 28, Don Dugan and Dorothy Bardwell of Bloomington dropped out after Dugan began suffering chest pains. The competition finally came to an end around 5:30 a.m. on Monday, July 9, when Roy Valentine and Luella Hefner of Bloomington failed to take the floor after a rest period (the third-place couple, Don Wise and Francis Montague of Decatur, had dropped out a few days earlier). Apparently, Hefner had heeded repeated entreaties to call it quits by family members worried about her health.
That left Jack Moreland and Lucille Bowman of Bloomington champions after 396 hours on the dance floor. Bunnell Bros, a local shoe store on the south side of the Courthouse Square, soon advertised the Bostonian brand shoes Moreland wore during the competition. It was said he had danced more than 300 hours in one pair of Bostonians without leaving a single callus on his feet.
Bloomington was home to several competitive marathon dancers, including out-of-work 19-year-old Charles Roberts, who in the fall of 1930 surpassed 1,000 hours at a Peoria competition dancing with “pretty and plucky” Evelyn Zepp. The previous year Roberts had captured the top prize in a Champaign, Ill. dance marathon.
Sunny Slope Pavilion, located near Bon-Go Park but on the west side of Rt. 2 (now U.S. Highway 51), also hosted several early 1930s dance marathons. In the summer of 1932, for example, the venue, located at the future site of the now-demolished Bloomington Sale Barn, played host to a competition that lasted more than 40 days.
The human capacity to endure monotony, repetition, humiliation, and exhaustion, both physical and mental, is always a thing of wonder. As marathon dances dragged interminably onward, organizers often resorted to punishing rule changes and mini-tests of stamina designed to winnow the field or crown a champion. Rest and / or sleep breaks were shortened or eliminated altogether, for instance, and “sprints” of feverishly paced dancing were interspersed between the monotonous shuffling.
Sydney Pollack’s gritty film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” from 1969, starring Jane Fonda and Gig Young, takes place during a Great Depression-era dance marathon on the Santa Monica Pier in California. Although the film is known for its dark mood, gloomy atmospherics and violent denouement, it played a role in the resurgence of marathon dancing in the early 1970s, especially on college campuses where the edgy film found a natural audience.
Northwestern University, to cite one of the more better known examples, has staged a philanthropic dance marathon since 1972. And last weekend, Sat., March 5, Illinois Wesleyan University held a 12-hour dance marathon for the benefit of the Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria.
Back during the Great Depression, dance marathons eventually fell out of favor and were replaced by walkathons, at least locally. Beginning in 1934, the Louis E. Davis American Legion Post 56 sponsored several fundraising walkathons at the old Bloomington Coliseum. The Legion charged admission so spectators could watch contestants circle the cavernous main floor. Public dances were also held many evenings simultaneously with the competition, and vaudeville acts sometimes performed during rest periods.
The collections of the McLean County Museum of History include a Coliseum walkathon program from the spring of 1934. This contest got underway on March 22 with more than 60 participants, including those from Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis and Chicago. Bloomington participants included local walkathon legend Johnny Ellsworth and his partner Cora Helmick.
By April 16, the date of this program, there were eleven couples and two solo dancers still walking the Coliseum track.
That same day, April 16, two of the remaining walkathon contestants, Marjorie Mollman, 19, of Lockport, Ill., and Charles O. Ripley, 21, of Paducah, Ky., were married before 3,500 spectators at the Coliseum. After a marriage ceremony officiated by Justice of the Peace Rolla Jones, the bride and groom stepped back onto the track and continued the walkathon.
The really interesting thing was the newlyweds were on different teams.