When Mildred Henderson thinks back on her youthful days of swing dancing and jitterbugging in Vancouver dance halls, she needn’t do anything more to connect with those memories than go downstairs to her basement and dance a few simple steps on a very special hardwood floor.
Born in Manitoba, but raised in Vancouver since she was five, Henderson recalls the days when she would leave her family’s home downtown on Pendrell Street and join friends hopping Vancouver streetcars to take in a number of local venues in one evening.
“We were crazy for dancing. Wherever we went, dancing had to be there. We loved big band music — Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey,” Henderson says.
Having a ball
In the late 1940s and ’50s, Vancouverites were hardly limited in their choices for an evening out. Young people in particular flocked to cut a rug at now mostly long forgotten downtown dance halls such as the Embassy Ballroom on Davie Street or the Howden Ballroom on Granville Street.
“When we were single and young, we went to the White Rose Ballroom [at 1248 West Broadway],” Henderson says. “It wasn’t a fancy place — just a floor and a bandstand, but we really liked to dance there. The boys would stand on one side, and the girls on the other, and they’d come over and ask you to dance. My friends and I were good dancers and popular wherever we went. And we knew the guys who were the good dancers or not — that’s all that mattered to us.”
Another popular downtown destination would be Danceland.
Originally the Alexandra Ballroom, it was located at 804 Hornby St., at the corner of Hornby and Robson. The Alexander — or known simply as “the Alex” to Vancouverites at the time — had originally opened in 1922 in the second floor of the Clements Building, and later featured local dance orchestras led by bandleaders such as Leo “Suntan” Smuntan, Eric Gee and Trevor Page, who typically played favourite songs of the day such as “String of Pearls,” “Little Brown Jug” or “Jersey Bounce.” And while the band name might not have had a typically stinging handle like rock bands that play clubs today, it was locals Len Chamberlain and His Twinkletoes that pulled wallflowers onto the dance floor in droves, and not just those who lived in the West End, but from all over the city.
“At one point a few places had closed, and it was the only place you could go to. It was open late, and they always had a great band,” Henderson says.
For a time, the offices of CKNW radio moved into the top floor of the building and the home to Jack Cullen’s 100,000 album strong record collection. The ballroom was eventually renamed Danceland in 1956.
Henderson herself eventually married, and in 1960 she and her husband bought the Burnaby home she still lives in for $15,000. As she got older and busier with her family, she had less time for the dance halls, and when she did go out with her husband and her friends, they tended to visit clubs like the Cave and the Commodore.
But Danceland remained a popular spot for a whole new generation of youth as new sounds would be heard out its second-storey windows. Touring musicians such as Del Shannon and early local rock ’n’ roll and R&B groups such as the Electras and Howie Vickers and the Viscounts regularly performed there. On Saturday Sept. 7, 1963, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue played Danceland’s stage. It’s remembered as one of the last notable shows to ever play the venue.
Salvages of time
In a fate all too common to Vancouver nightclubs over the years, Danceland closed and was demolished in June 1965. As the club was torn up and the building was being readied for demolition, a foreman named Hugh Glendinning remarked to Vancouver Sun reporter Nadine Asante, who was covering the venue’s closure, “We are getting far more in salvage out of the place than we expected. We even got a bottle of whiskey, which had fallen down behind the bandstand and was forgotten by some merry-maker. Old vintage, too!”
But for her part, Mildred Henderson never forgot those nights spent dancing on that floor, and when the opportunity came to have a piece of Danceland itself before the wrecking ball took it all, she couldn’t pass it up.
“My brother-in-law worked near there at a gas station, and he heard it was closing. So he went by and they were pulling up the wooden dance floor in long slats and going to throw it all out. He bought it all off it. He took some of it for his cabin in Point Roberts and we got the rest of it for $35. We did our whole basement floor with it.”
If the Danceland floor had seen legions of Vancouverites’ dancing feet, for the next 50 years it survived its own happy wear-and-tear from dancing shoes and spilled drinks from more than a few house parties, and eventually, the feet of the Hendersons’ children and grandchildren. Even after enduring a basement flood years ago, the old Danceland floor is still in good condition.
And, at 92, so is Mildred Henderson — though she takes life a little easier and slower than she did when her and her friends tore up the dance floors of her youth.
“I danced on the floor when it was at Danceland, and I’ve danced on it here in my home,” she smiles.
@TheAaronChapman
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