I hadn’t even finished lunch yet, but there was Dad, holding my coat and saying, "Come on, Let’s go. I don’t want to be late for our meeting." Dad had promised to take me with him when he went to tour the old barn where he and my uncle, Ed Bowers, hoped to create a place for us kids to dance and have fun. I was thankful for a good reason to leave that Spam and cheese sandwich half eaten on my plate. It was still cold outside, which was appropriate for a winter day in Kansas City. So on that Saturday in January of 1960, Dad and I left our house there on eighty-sixth street just off of Metcalf in Overland Park and headed south. Metcalf, as a named road, ended at eighty-seventh street, as did most of the residential developments and from there south the road was known as 69 Highway. Of course, in those days it was all two lane, the old highway dissecting the farmland that is now south Overland Park as it passed the few cross streets there were back then; 87th, 95th, and 103rd then nothing until the old Martin City/Olathe Road, later to be numbered 135th Street, where Mr. Reno had a lake on the southeast corner. There was another lake I remember well. We passed it as Dad turned west on the gravel road where someone had posted a wooden sign that said 95th Street. The small lake was part of the Dickenson farm, known as The Glenwood. It covered about 480 acres mostly north of 95th and west of 69 highway and had been where the Dickenson family raised and showed their premium Angus cattle. Part of the pastureland between Lowell and Antioch north of 95th Street had been sold off and there was a new subdivision getting ever closer to the large white house where the Dickenson’s had lived. Behind the house to the north was a utility building used for storing the farms various equipment, and behind it stood the huge old barn.
I had seen the barn many times before as we passed by it on one of our Sunday drives, but had never really given it any special attention. This time was different though. As Dad turned the car up the driveway and we passed by the old house, my attention was focused completely on the barn. Dad had always told me that is important to see things as they are, but also to imagine how they could be. And my imagination was running wild.
Just a few weeks before my Uncle Ed had taken me to another barn. It was out off the east side of New 50 Highway, (now I-35), back behind the Standard Oil gas station at about 119th Street. He had taken me there to get my opinion as a teenager. Now this barn was owned by a man named Berry, or maybe it was Barry, I am not sure now. I just remember that everybody there called it Berry’s Barn. When we arrived there must have been fifty cars parked all around and Mr Berry was sitting on the stairway to the hayloft with a cigar box collecting fifty cents from all that entered. There was a live band playing that night, and as I recall it was a group called Larry Emmett and The Sliders. The music seemed to bellow out of the open hayloft doors. My uncle said hello to Mr Berry, who let us pass without payment and we went on in. My uncle had worked there regularly as a uniformed chaperone, so to speak. He was an officer with the county Sheriff’s Department and took the job as an off duty security guard. We did not stay long that night, but I will never forget the excitement I felt, recalling the months of conversations between my Dad and Ed about the possibilities of opening their own place for kids to go.
The old Dickinson barn was not the first place we had looked at, nor the second or third but another one of many, most of which were more modern buildings that would have been nearly ready to go but were just way more expensive than what Dad and Ed thought was affordable
As we approached the barn on the rutted old drive, I could see Ed and another gentleman standing out front and talking. The gentleman turned out to be Glen Dickenson, the property owner and also the head of the Dickenson Theater chain. (A few years later he would build and manage the Glenwood Motor Lodge and Glenwood Theater at 91st and Metcalf.) Mr Dickenson greeted my father and acknowledged me, then continued talking. He had been telling Ed about the history of the barn. It had been built in the early 1920's to house and show the champion Angus cattle his family raised.
This was a barn of barns. The side walls were constructed from heavy duty concrete blocks. It had a concrete floor, both downstairs and in the hayloft. I don’t remember the dimensions now but Dad says he remembers the barn to be about 120' X 50'. The upstairs floor was supported by concrete I-beams with steel support beams downstairs. These support beams became the corner posts for the twelve stalls down each side inside the barn, leaving a center isle open from one end to the other. There was a hay rail down the center of the open ceiling in the hayloft that was used to move hay bales about. A huge grain bin was located at the north end of the loft. It was connected to the twin silos outside, and there were holes in the floor where chutes from the grain bin were that allowed for obtaining feed downstairs. The upstairs had two windows high on the wall of the south end with a loft door centered below them and there were three loft doors on the east side that were used for loading the hay in. The north end of the downstairs was one open room that had been used for equipment storage and there was a stairway that started just inside a door on the side and led to the upstairs just in front of the grain bin. There was very primitive electricity and no running water, except what could be pumped up from an old cistern and, of course, no restroom facilities. When the barn was cleaned last, and who knows when that was, all the cow manure was piled into one of the stalls downstairs. It was about four feet deep. Early on in the barns history, Mr. Dickenson said they had problems with the cattle slipping on the concrete floor and falling down and getting hurt, so they had spread rock dust on the floor. As it got wet, then hardened, it provided a rough texture which gave the cattle better footing. I originally thought the floor was dirt, but soon learned otherwise.
The Dickensons had quit the cattle business as their theater business demanded more and more of their time and the old barn had sat empty for nearly ten years. During our 30 minute tour, I remember seeing a couple of big black snakes in the years old hay upstairs and several scurring rats and at least one coon. I went to sit in the car. I thought, "You’ve got to be kidding." If it had been brand new, that might have been something - but who would want to go here. When Dad got back to the car, he asked me what I thought. I just shook my head, and said, "Not sure what to think." Dad said, "Have a little vision - use your imagination - I think we can make a pretty nice place there."
When we got home, Mom got a plate out of the refrigerator and said, "Finish you sandwich. Did you like the barn?" Dad and Ed signed a two year lease the next week and began talking to the local officials about permits. And so the plans began. Dad told me to talk to my friends and see if I could come up with a good name. I don’t remember now for sure who decided on the term sock hop, but it was me who said, "Let’s leave the ‘k’ off sock and just make it the SOC HOP"
The SOC HOP officially opened in April of that year and as you might well imagine, the Bowers (Ed, Doris, Penny and Linda) and the Weavers (Mike, Alice, John, Mark, and me) spent the rest of January, February, March and most of April getting the place ready. We spent hours scrapping the old rock dust off the downstairs floor, cleaning out the stall of old manure, which to my chagrin was still damp in the middle. We spent every spare minute painting the walls and stall rails, doing the plumbing and electrical work necessary. Some professionals were hired, of course, but most of the hard work was done by our two families. Dad bought some old wagon wheels and he and I made the chandeliers that hung upstairs and we used some old double trees from horse drawn wagons to make hanging lamps downstairs. The restroom mirrors were horse collars with mirrors in the center.
Picnic tables were put together and placed in some of the stalls downstairs, the feed bins along the walls were filled with gravel and dirt and small evergreen trees planted in them, a snack bar was built and equipped, a front counter and coat room were built inside the front door. We tore down the grain bin upstairs and rebuilt it to be a stage that looked like the front porch of a small cabin with two dressing rooms on the inside.
A flexible dance floor was installed and Mr. Dickenson provided us with old theatre chairs to line the walls with. A big water tank with a pump was placed outside the Snack Bar and the water was pumped in. Dad bought an old hearse, put a big water tank in the back of it, parked it at home in the driveway and ran the garden hose into it. When the tank got full, he would carefully drive it down to the barn and re-pump it into the big tank there. Later we got a big tank on a wheeled trailer that I would take over on Lowell and hook a fire hose up to a hydrant and the water company let us get water that way for a while. Hal Reno brought in truck loads of gravel and the old corn field became a parking lot, though when it rained, everyone still had to take turns pushing each other either in or out of the place. As both Dad and Ed had their own full time careers, I became the one who got to go open the place up, sometimes just to let the Pepsi man in, or to let the band in, or whatever needed to be done. I was the cleanup guy. Everyone new me, I was the kid in the SOC HOP shirt. All of a sudden I had a thousand friends. I was usually the first person to get there and the last one to leave, though often my buddies stayed to help me with the chores. (Thanks go to Bob Rigdon, Ernie Ashlock, Fred Allison, and my old friend Bill Cresto.) We all put in a hell of a lot of hard work. But looking back at it now, I know for sure I WISH I COULD DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN.
