EVERETT — After nearly 60 years of fox trots and rhumbas, and a few of the chicken dance, an area club plans to hold its last get-together tonight.
The Jubilee-Reveleers’ final event is set to begin at 6 p.m. at the Everett Golf and Country Club.
Dwindling membership is to blame for putting an end to the last dance club in town, longtime member Anna Lucas said.
“It’s sad,” she said. “It’s a very sad thing.”
The youngest of the club’s bunch is in his late 50s, she said, and the group has struggled to attract a younger generation. If young people came, “then you’d have to provide rock and hoopla music,” Lucas said, although she said she doesn’t mind it too much.
Lucas and her husband, Dr. William Lucas, started attending club events more than 25 years ago.
She remembers the way her sweet-voiced husband would sing along as he swung her around the dance floor.
He remembers dancing until the band left and slipping some money into the jukebox to dance a few hours more.
“I couldn’t do that now and I wouldn’t want to,” Dr. Lucas chuckled.
Harry Stuchell and his wife, Carol, were one of 60 couples who started the Reveleers in 1949. At age 25, they were the youngest of the bunch. The original group included some of the movers and shakers in Everett, including doctors, attorneys and business owners.
The Stuchells needed a break, some time to themselves, while raising six children.
In the beginning, the club rented halls around town and played recorded music on a Nickelodeon, he said. Within a few years, the club started hiring orchestras. There were theme dances with elaborate costumes and always good music.
“They played swing music, the good old music, not the stuff the kids dance to these days,” Stuchell said.
They’d dance to rhumbas, waltzes, fox trots and swings. For a while, they did the chicken dance, after the Stuchells picked it up on a trip overseas.
“The Germans do it a lot,” he said. “You wave your arms and wiggle your hips.”
Later, the club would merge with another, the Jubilees. It was a sign of what was happening to dance clubs all over. As membership dropped, clubs merged or disappeared entirely. Anna Lucas tried to talk the younger members of her family into joining. It didn’t take.
Younger folks are missing out on something, she said.
“There’s a camaraderie you had when you went to dance,” she said. “It’s too bad that it’s dwindling.”
Tonight at the country club, a live band will perform classics from the 1940s and ’50s, including swing.
Some of the old-timers, unable to jitterbug the way they used to, will simply be there to watch and remember.
Anna Lucas plans to slip into a pair of black satin flats and a red pants suit. Her husband will be wearing a charcoal gray suit and a tie.
When they hit the floor, it won’t be too different from when he first took her hand and led her onto a dance floor when she was 19.
“It’s kind of like you’re looking at 81 and you’re the last of an era,” Dr. Lucas said. “It’s the same thing that the Elks and the Eagles are going through. People today are too involved in their electronic devices and games. They don’t go out anywhere anymore.”
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com.
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