The bleak story behind the birth of dance marathons

[MUSIC PLAYING] CATHY WURZER: Here's a question for you. Have you ever participated in a walkathon to raise money for a charity? You probably have. It's a big event. It's usually a lot of fun. Have you heard about dance-a-thons? Now, these were wildly popular in the 1920s and '30s, where dancers would be on their feet all day and all night with the last couple standing declared the winners.

Here's what you might not know. Dance-a-thons have roots in the state of Minnesota. Local journalist and history buff Katie Thornton looked into the history of these marathon dances and found a rather grim back story. She joins us right now with the details as part of our Minnesota Now and Then series. Welcome back.

KATIE THORNTON: Thank you so much, Cathy. Great to be here.

CATHY WURZER: How exactly did these dance marathons start?

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, that is a great question because they started in a informal, somewhat organic way. And they really changed over time. But they started actually in 1923. There was a woman in New York. Her name was Alma Cummings. And seemingly just for fun, she danced for 27 hours straight. She had a variety of dance partners who she exhausted over the course of many hours. And she just wanted to set a record in a way.

The context of this is that in the 1920s, there was this obsession with setting records. The modern Olympics had started just a handful of decades before. So there was this big emphasis on record setting. And this was also the 1920s where, for some people, there was a lot of optimism, and there was a lot of engineering accomplishments, a lot of these remarkable feats of human ingenuity.

And there was a tandem obsession with figuring out the limits of the human body. People were sitting on flagpoles for hours on end. They were walking across the entire country. So this is part of that vein.

CATHY WURZER: OK. You also wrote that during the Great Depression, these shows weren't just for fun and for seeing how far you could go. They were actually a matter of survival for some of the dancers.

KATIE THORNTON: Yes, absolutely. So these dance marathons, which started as this early curiosity, were very quick to be capitalized upon and, in many ways, exploited. So you had this woman in 1923 set this record for dancing for 24 hours straight. I believe within a week, that record was broken something like nine times across the country.

So people were really interested in this, which, if you're a promoter, means you might start thinking about how you can make money off of it. And so at different dance halls and other locations, really across the country, including here in Minnesota, throughout the 1920s, there started to be these formalized dance marathons, where there would be prizes to the couple who could dance for the longest.

And in the Great Depression, that ended up taking a turn for the grim in a lot of ways. Dance marathons during the Great Depression were a way that people could guarantee to have a roof over their head. They were a way to guarantee that you would be fed. These marathons provided food multiple times throughout the day. And if you won, you could win very large prizes that sometimes rivaled an annual salary of what someone might make on a farm.

CATHY WURZER: But, of course, there were these health risks-- I mean, we have to be honest about that-- not only during the 1920s, but in the 1930s. I mean, you see photographs of-- they had medics that were there and nurses and that kind of thing. It looked pretty unpleasant.

KATIE THORNTON: Yes, they did. And I think it's worth noting that the 27 hours that were danced by Alma Cummings end up becoming dwarfed by the dancing that happens in these later years. People were dancing for days and weeks, and even months on end. Of course, there were some rule changes that enabled that to be possible.

But something that was pretty common was that these dance marathons would take place over the course of weeks, and you could sleep for 15 minutes of every hour. There were cots provided, often on site. There were, as you said, nurses and medics on hand to rub people's feet, to treat illnesses. And it wasn't necessarily very safe. It also wasn't-- it got to a point where it was glorified walking, in a lot of ways.

They would do these dance sprints where they really had to dance together, but for the most part, you were just sort of walking, and you just had to be in motion to be considered dancing. For the partner dances, also, there were rules like your partner could sleep if you held them up such that their knees didn't touch the floor. You would be disqualified if their knees touched the floor.

All daily activities, reading the paper, shaving, brushing your teeth, had to take place on the dance floor. And so this was a way that people drew people in. But it was quite voyeuristic. It became quite voyeuristic and exploitative.

CATHY WURZER: OK. So I've been to Lakewood Cemetery, and I notice that there is a gentleman who's buried there. And I wanted to know more about him. And I bet you know who this is. He apparently was a dance marathoner.

KATIE THORNTON: Yes, this is true. And this is actually how I first learned about dance marathons. It's, of course, a national phenomenon, but it does have this really strong Minnesota connection. So as you mentioned, there is a grave at Lakewood Cemetery, which I saw-- I grew up-- Lakewood Cemetery was the big park that we would go to. I loved going to the cemetery and just reading the headstones. I went on to work there.

And this headstone in Section 11 reads, "Callum DeVillier, World Champion Marathon Dancer, 3,780 Continuous Hours," which truly begs some questions. And this is actually how I ended up getting interested in marathon dancing, how was it possible for somebody to dance for over five months? And this is how I set out down this road of learning about this long and complicated history.

CATHY WURZER: Well, what did you find out about this gentleman?

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, so he is from Lanesboro. His family ran a candy shop in Lanesboro. His older brother was a musician. But he started getting in on the dance marathon circuit in the 1920s when he was working in a restaurant washing dishes.

And he took the Minnesota circuit by storm. There was record of him blowing the judges away in Brainerd. And he ended up getting a little bit on the national circuit. He danced this really, really remarkable dance marathon that he's memorialized on his grave in Massachusetts outside of Boston in the 1930s, in 1933.

And that's where he danced-- he and his partner, his dance partner Vonnie Kuchinski, danced for over five months. The dance marathon took place outside of Boston. Couldn't take place in Boston proper because the city of Boston had actually banned these dance marathons after somebody died after the marathon. So it took place in the suburbs of Boston. And it was truly a remarkable feat. And together, they won the $1,000 prize.

CATHY WURZER: You mentioned that dance marathons were pretty voyeuristic, and they were not terribly healthy, obviously. And clearly, Boston wasn't excited about it. Did other governments jump in and ban these things? Is that why the dance marathons kind of went by the wayside after a certain point?

KATIE THORNTON: They definitely had their detractors, I think, for very good reasons. It's interesting because there were a lot of moral complaints. And obviously, these were quite voyeuristic, quite exploitative.

But a lot of the complaints that I read about came from, oh, it's too crowded. People are coming out at all hours to see the dance marathon, and there's these crowds in our neighborhood, which is interesting that was often the argument against them rather than the well-being of the dancers themselves. But they fell out of fashion more so as the Depression went on.

People didn't necessarily have the money to be going out and seeing these dancers every night. There would be a small admission fee, which would ultimately end up paying the award money to the dancers. And especially when World War II rolled around, it was just really not a priority to come out and see folks dancing, quote unquote, "around a dance hall floor for hours and hours on end."

CATHY WURZER: Sure. Sure. So did these events turn into the walkathons of today, in a sense?

KATIE THORNTON: They did. They really dropped out after World War II. And they were sort of forgotten, at least in popular culture for a while. Of course, people still had memories of these things, but they went from being this fun thing to try out in the 1920s to something much more grim and much more sad.

And in 1969, the film They Shoot Horses, Don't They? came out with Jane Fonda, and that ended up bringing it back into people's cultural memory. It's a very sad story. And so that really reiterated that these were very heavy, complicated things, these dance marathons.

But about four years later, it was, I believe-- yeah, Penn State-- Penn State University, students at Penn State University ended up having like a more moderated and sanitized version of a dance marathon where the contest was capped at 30 hours, and no one could dance for more than 30 hours. And they raised a couple thousands of dollars for a charity.

And so, let's say this was in the 1970s, and this became more and more common. Until the 1990s, dance marathons, especially at colleges and universities, were really a popular fundraiser. And that eventually morphed into the more accessible walkathons that we see really often today.

CATHY WURZER: There you go, the stuff you learn. And the fact that your curiosity was triggered by a gravestone, I love that.

KATIE THORNTON: So often, I mean, you can always find-- you read an epitaph, and there's always a story to it.

CATHY WURZER: There absolutely is. Everybody's got a story, Katie, and you know that. Thank you so much. This was great fun. Thank you.

KATIE THORNTON: Thank you so much for talking today, Cathy. Good to talk with you.

CATHY WURZER: That was Minneapolis-based journalist and historian Katie Thornton. You can find more of her work at itskatiethornton.com. And you can find a photograph of that amazing headstone that we were talking about on our website mprnews.org.