A long time ago in Delta, Utah, a man named Billy Van built a dance hall. It was upstairs over a big garage he owned on Main Street. It had slick wooden floors and a little stage for the band.
People loved to dance, back in those days in the early 1930s. They'd come from as far away as Kanosh and Fillmore. The entire population of Millard County was about 6,000, and sometimes it seemed like they were all at Billy Van's, swaying to the waltzes of Parley Elder's band.Summer and winter, every Saturday night, and on all the big holidays, Van's dance hall filled up.
But Van wasn't content with the place, even though it was successful. He was a tinkerer, an inventor, an improver. With the help of his wife and four children, Van started making the place fancy.
He started building models and balls and chandeliers and covering them with little bits of mirror and glass. He strung lights. He kept adding to his creation, driving regularly to Salt Lake to pick up broken mirrors from a glass store. He laid a new floor and slicked it up with alum.
Over the years, Van pasted several hundred thousand bits of glass around that room. His sons covered the walls with shiny automotive paint, in passionate colors.
Eventually, the dance hall became a twinkling wonderland.
Abandoned in the 1970s, the dance hall was never dismantled. The building is now owned by one of Billy's granddaughters. And upstairs over the dance floor, still, hangs a big sparkling ball - replete with airplane, banner, temple and a miniature model train.
Billy's son, George VanDeVanter (his dad always went by the shortened version of the name) was a teenager when they built the big ball. They fastened two wagon wheels together and rounded out the form with gauze and packing, VanDeVanter recalls. He figures the big ball weighs several hundred pounds.
"I helped my dad do the wiring. It all turns because of the wind from that little airplane. It's powered by a transformer. The train runs in the opposite direction from the airplane."
In the winter the room was heated by a big potbellied stove. It was George's job to chop wood and get the stove started early on Saturday morning. When the snow started falling before noon, the family members would tell each other, "Oh, we won't get anybody tonight." But people would come anyway, often as many as several hundred people. They would drive in a caravan from the neighboring towns, digging each other out when a car got stuck.
When he was 16, George got the job of "coat boy." "We didn't have hanging racks; I just wadded them up and shoved them in a hole."
In the summer, Billy Van would cool his dancehall with an electric fan of his own invention, a whirling device that blew air past a sheet of flannel that was repeatedly dipped into water.
Especially on deer hunting weekends, the dance hall continued to draw crowds, clear through the 1960s. But its most plush days were in the 1930s and '40s. During the '30s there was a CCC camp near Delta. During World War II the workers from the Topaz Japanese internment camp frequented the hall. In those days the stag line wound halfway around the floor.
VanDeVanter's wife, Beda, explains, "You'd dance the first dance with your boyfriend and the last dance with your boyfriend, then in between you'd dance with other boys. It was a good way to meet people."
And if a guy came in and felt too shy to ask a gal to dance, Billy Van would take him over and introduce him to someone. And if some of the regulars didn't have the $1 for admission, VanDeVanter says, "My dad would wave them in and say, `Pay me next time.' "
Everyone knew the rules of the place. You were supposed to do your drinking and your smoking and your fighting outside. There were a few fights, out behind the hall, VanDeVanter recalls, but not like the fights of today. No weapons. "And if you knocked someone down, you'd wait until he got up before you hit him again."
Billy Van died in 1942. His sons went off to war. His wife kept the dance hall going. Eventually a new generation came back from war, wanting to dance, wanting to meet someone.
Romance. That is what people still remember about Van's, says Beda VanDeVanter. "They come up to me and say, `Oh I met my husband there.' Or `I met my wife.' "
Up until the day he died, VanDeVanter's brother Frank was hoping someone would want to buy the dance hall and restore it. Now, George VanDeVanter is kind of hoping the same thing. He knows today's young people don't dance the same way and that they'd never try the stag line idea, but he still thinks, with some new wiring, the old dance hall could be as important to the county as it once was.
The town would be lively late on a Saturday night, just the way it used to be.
And once again one of the great truths of human nature would play out under that twirling ball, just as before, when the girls from Delta preferred to dance with the boys from Fillmore while the girls from Fillmore preferred the boys from Delta.