The Importance of Square Dancing

by John Fopeano

I would like to get on record the importance of square dancing.

When we first came to the university in 1954, there was a Newcomers' Club. The wives did the organizing. You could belong to the Newcomers' Club for two years. I met people whose at least casual friendship has gone on over the years from those first two years in the Newcomers' Club.

One of the activities that my wife and I were in was the square dancing. We had three kids at that time, and for two dollars we could come over and spend an evening square dancing. Nobody made a lot of money. I think people don't realize now how little professors made then. Square dancing was something you could do that was very inexpensive. All of us together paid our caller probably twenty dollars for the evening.

We had the same caller for years and years. That square dance started out in the women's gym, went over to a faculty club at Beck Hall, and then went to Harriman Library, which became a faculty club. The square dancing went to Amherst, when Amherst finally opened. Then they threw us out of that, and we went over to a church on Minnesota and Main Street.

The square dancing kept going until about 1998. There were a lot of the same original people. Art Mattern, from the chemistry department, was a man who kept it going for a long, long time. I met people I would never have met otherwise, because it was a university-wide thing that brought people together.