By Gloria Mona

     Dancing has been a rhythmic form of human social involvement and personal pleasure ever since Adam first heard angel’s harps and asked Eve, “May I have this dance?”

     Some of today’s Adams and Eves are likely to be found waltzing and swing dancing in places most people, living in urban areas, don’t even know exist—Grange Halls.

     In early pioneer history, dancing was one of the joys of community life and Granges “lightened their labor” by playing host to the dancing life of its members and the public.

     The Grange was conceived in 1867, during the horse and buggy, one-man-plodding-behind-a-plow days, was brought into being to stimulate the rural people both farm and non-farm, and to dignify as well as “lighten their labor.”

     The horse and buggy have disappeared and the one man plow has disappeared from suburbia.  So have the myriad farms, thick as wild flowers, that once dotted the American landscape.  They made this country an agrarian society, but dancing and the Grange are still an integral part of community life in some parts of rural Oregon.  And it still features two important human concepts – old-fashioned friendliness and old-fashioned hospitality – still going strong in spite of the Jet Age.

     Put on your dancing shoes, be they boots, brogues, or ballet slippers and come with me.  Before the night is over, you will have mingled and danced and eaten with 100 to 150 people.

     The dance begins at 9 p.m.  At the door, when we pay our dollar apiece admission, we are greeted with a hearty handshake and a big smile by the Grange Master who is also chairman of the dance committee.

     He has the weathered wrinkled face and friendly features of a cattleman but in reality he is an engineering draftsman.  He is tall, slim, and extroverted.  When he moves around the dance floor during a hot, fast one, you immediately know why he was a jitterbug champ in his youth.

     His pretty wife will be in the kitchen with other Grange ladies, making ham sandwiches and cutting the homemade pies and cakes which will be sold later in the evening during a 30 minute intermission.  Dancing, the Grange way, is exhausting because no one is allowed to sit on the sidelines; everybody dances.  If you don’t have a date, it doesn’t matter because somewhere in the big Hall are at least a dozen people who are going to dance with you before the night is over.

     Someone hollers out Paul Jones which is a “mixer.”  You start with one partner and end up dancing with six or eight others.

     You might dance with Grandpa Charley Edwards who is in his 80s and has been dancing in this building for 50 years. He wears tennis shoes to dance in and can swing and jitterbug with the best of them as well as waltz and fox trot. You might see a 15 year old, sweet faced, wholesome brunette with a flip hairdo and a dimpled smile twirl by, in the arms of her father. She’s danced in the Grange Hall since she was 12.  Her parents have seven children and 11 grandchildren and every one of them learned to dance here.

     The dance ends at 1 a.m. and as we squeeze out the door into the warm, moonlit night, we see Grandpa Edwards, trudging slowly down the highway, making his way home with the help of his hand-carved cane.