While Superbowl XLIV (44 for the Roman numerally challenged) grabbed most of yesterday’s media attention, Stanford University students made news by updating a Depression era phenomenon—the Dance Marathon.
In yesterday’s event, Stanford students danced for 24 hours to raise money for Partners in Health, a nonprofit that provides healthcare to AIDS sufferers in the poorest parts of world. (You can read more about it at “Stanford students dance around the clock for a good cause” and see a video.) Reconceived, exploitive dance marathons of the past are being transformed into fundraisers for good causes.
As difficult and painful as it is to stay on your feet for 24 hours, the Stanford dance-athon was a tame affair compared to the cruel endurance contests of the 1920s and 1930s. These dance marathons were staged and rigged events where people paid 10 cents for admission to watch couples compete for prize money. Dancers had to keep moving for 45 minutes out of every hour, for weeks on end. Nobody benefited but the promoters.
A dance marathon held in my hometown of Spokane, Washington, closed October 12, 1935, after 1,638 hours. That’s about two months. At that time, my mother’s parents hadn’t yet settled in Spokane. In 1935, Grandpa was working in Topeka, Kansas, for Phillips Petroleum, a job he got as a result of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. I don’t know if my grandparents ever saw a dance marathon during their travels from place to place in search of work, but most likely not. They wouldn’t have wasted the dime. While my mother was a 7-year-old child in Topeka, my father was a 10-year old boy on a small dairy farm near Gold Bar, Washington.
The marathons finally came to an end as cities and towns passed ordinances banning them and as World War II gave people something more important to do. HistoryLink.org has an interesting article on Dance Marathons.
Tip: If you are researching what life was like in Washington state for a family history, HistoryLink.org is a great resource. It’s a large and evolving online encyclopedia of state and local history in Washington state.
Photograph: Digital ID: npcc 08260. Source: digital file from original Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-npcc-08260 (digital file from original). Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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