As Mattapoisett resident Brad Hathaway shifted through yellowing documents and old school papers drafted seven decades ago, he came across an assignment that made his heart tickle with joy. The professor had written across the top, “Good story, should be printed in some paper.” Hathaway could never have imagined as he typed his essay on a manual typewriter way back then that it would resurface and, in fact, be printed in a newspaper.
When Hathaway contacted The Wanderer to share what he thought was a good story idea, one that might draw a few lines from his essay when he declared, “Do what you want with it, I don’t want it back.” He was hoping for not so much a reprint of his work but that it might inspire a larger story to which many in the Tri-Town area might respond.
Hathaway was, once upon a time, a journalism student who interviewed a local square dance caller. Square dancing was a popular pastime in those days, and many residents will recall weekend square dancing long before the advent of sock hops.
For one young lady, Patricia Ann Sylvia (later to become Mrs. Tate), also of Mattapoisett, square dancing was a family affair. During Hathaway’s interview, the young woman explained, “The fact that I ever got interested in (square dance) calling in the first place was an accident.” Continuing on, Hathaway wrote that Tate’s mother and father were regular attendees of dances held in the Bourne Grange Hall. One night, Tate went along with her parents and planned to go rollerskating at the nearby rink. However, it was closed. “I went back to the Grange Hall to get the car keys,” but there was a shortage of women at the dance that night, she told Hathaway. “Up to that time, I had never square danced in my life.… I enjoyed myself immediately, and when I heard the caller, I vowed to myself that I, too, would someday call,” Hathaway wrote.
Now, as the veil of time is drawn back a bit further, Tate shared her remaining memories of those earlier days with The Wanderer. “My father was the president of the PTA at Center School. Dad thought it would be a good idea and fun fundraiser to hold a square dance. A truck holding a band played in our backyard the first year the event was held. The following year it was held at the wharves next to Shipyard Park.”
Tate said that callers came from abroad to call at local dances. She would learn the calls while sitting in the back seat of the car on family trips to Bourne. She and her parents would sing out the calls in the car as they drove to the venue. “The calls were singing calls back then,” she said, as compared to the more “Western-type of calls,” and she knew them by heart.
On one auspicious night, she got her big break. “My father asked caller Charlie Dexter to give me a chance,” she softly laughed, “that was the beginning.” She said she would go on to call at the Brockton Fair, at private homes, on Martha’s Vineyard, and at many other venues over the next two years. And it would be a brief chapter in her long life when she stepped out in front of live bands and called out to dancers who depended on her expertise to keep them moving smoothly across the dance floor.
Tate would tell Hathaway, “I was the guest caller one night.… It was my moment and only my third performance… I was petrified at first.” But that sensation would be replaced with excitement and joy. In 1950 she would call at the Mattapoisett Town Hall upstairs in the theater area. Tate told Hathaway that she and Dexter would give square dance lessons during the winter months in the Tri-Town area. Hathaway wrote, “She has only called twice to phonograph records; other times, an orchestra has been present. Pat said, ‘Calling is never dull. You always have to watch the dancers. If you see the people are having trouble, you must revise the call so they will enjoy themselves.’”
Enjoy themselves indeed. For decades, summer weekend evenings would find groups of square dancers dressed in their best costumes queuing up to dance under the stars at the Mattapoisett wharves.
What began as a PTA fundraiser would become a summer staple of stamping feet and swirling skirts, all choreographed by square dance callers, of which Tate was one.
During Hathaway’s interview with Tate, the young caller discussed square dancing with youthful exuberance. “If the crowd doesn’t seem to be having a good time, I pick up the tempo of the music. It is the caller who controls the tempo, not the orchestra.” Hathaway also wrote, “Pat calls mostly for the enjoyment of it. Yet, there are times when she gets as much as ten dollars for a performance.”
Today that translates to approximately $100 and still falls short of a professional caller’s bottom-dollar event rate. But the following truly gives us a sense of just how much the young Tate truly enjoyed square dancing. She told Hathaway, “My (small) stature is a definite advantage when it comes to square dancing.… The boys like to pick me up off the floor and swing me round.… They can’t do that with most of the girls!”
In closing out his interview, Hathaway learned that Tate’s favorite dance was the Alabama Jubilee and that “I like to call at the grange hall most of all because they have the best eats there.”
Hathaway would also write that Tate had written a yet-to-be-published book titled “Square Your Sets,” an introduction to square dancing geared towards children. Tate would go on to graduate from Boston University with a degree in education. For a period of time, she taught at Center School.
Tate told The Wanderer that, before returning home to settle down after graduation, she went to California, where she taught, followed by positions in Natick, Cape Cod, and New Bedford. While in California, she briefly studied and enjoyed folk dancing.
Group dancing heralds back to nearly the beginning of humankind. Clog dancing came to the new world with Irish immigrants along with other forms of traditional dance. It seems, however, that the evolution of those earlier dance forms to square dancing is an American invention.
While it faded in popularity, square dancing can still be found in cities and towns across the nation. Twenty-two U.S. states have declared square dancing as the state’s official dance, and there have been 30 bills sent to Congress to have it legislated as the country’s official dance. Not bad for a humble dance in which kicking up one’s heels is syncopated primarily to a fiddle.
It has been seven decades since Tate first took her place in front of a band and called out to a waiting crowd, “Bow to your partner,” to start an evening of square dancing, the memory of which still rings down through the years. Who knows, maybe one day square dancing will return to the wharves, and dancers will swing their partners under the stars on a brilliant summer’s evening once again.
By Marilou Newell