Have you ever thought something disappeared recently only to learn that it had been gone for a long time?
If so, you’ll understand how I felt learning just last month that a building once an important part of my life collapsed four years ago.
The building was the Trocadero Ballroom, later the Country Club Reel Theater, on Boise’s Overland Road. In my defense, I don’t get to that part of town often and am focused on traffic rather than the surroundings when I do. I knew the theater had closed but didn’t know that it had subsequently collapsed.
It was sobering to realize that the building once a scene of popular dances every weekend had been reduced to a memory.
For several years during my teens, it was the place to go on Friday and Saturday nights. Depending on what band was playing and what the competition from other venues was, its crowds numbered anywhere from fewer than a hundred to over a thousand.
Name acts who performed at the Trocadero included the Cascades, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Wayne Newton, Paul and Paula, Dick and DeeDee, the Wailers and the Marketts.
Some of the local bands who played there were Dick Cates and the Chessmen, the Chancellors, the Monarchs, the Coachmen, the Hitchhikers and the Mystics.
I was the Mystics’ guitar player. I had to chuckle when reading the AI description of the group:
“Popular local regulars who arrived in style, driving a cherry red 1956 Chrysler Crown Imperial limousine to their Friday night sets.”
The old limousine still has a place in our hearts. It was dark blue when we bought it, but we had it painted candy apple red with the name of the band in gold on the front doors. It was beautiful.
Picture/cutline: This isn’t the actual Mystics limousine, but it’s the same make, year, model and color. I found a picture of a black one, and my computer savvy granddaughter, Hailey West, changed it to red and added the band’s name on the door.
As mentioned above, we were the Friday night band; the Hitchhikers played Saturday nights. We were envious of that; Saturday was the main event, the night with the biggest crowds.
The Hitchhikers deserved it, though. They were older and better than we were. Two of them had been in Paul Revere and the Raiders.
The Trocadero’s manager was a disc jockey named Del Chapman. Del was also our manager. He initially got us gigs out of town because we weren’t experienced enough or good enough for “the Troc,” as everyone called it. Eventually we got better, though, and he made us the Friday night regulars.
That ended abruptly. After playing New Year’s Eve in Burns, Ore., we got up early on Friday morning to make it back to Boise in time to drive home and play at the Trocadero. A good plan – until the blizzard hit.
We were approaching Drinkwater Pass, a hilly area in eastern Oregon, when snow started falling thick and fast. In hardly any time, the highway was snow-covered and slick.
Then one of our tires blew out. It was slow going changing it because the jack kept slipping on the slick pavement. As if that hadn’t been enough, one of the power-window motors blew out. Smoke poured from all the windows.
As you can imagine, it took a while to get underway again. Worse, the road was slick most of the way to Boise. By the time we got to the Trocadero, set up our equipment and started to play we were 45 minutes late.
We thought we deserved a medal for getting there at all. Del didn’t. He quit as our manager and fired us from the Trocadero. We never played there again.
It could have meant the end of the band. Without our main gig, the future looked bleak.
Enter Bert Woodward, my dad.
It happened that one of the most popular dance halls in town, the Fiesta Ballroom, had been closed for months. I was sure that if we could reopen it, we’d have good crowds there. None of us were 21, but Dad signed the lease on the condition that we’d be responsible for running the place – including the bills.
It worked. We played there Saturday nights, competing with the Trocadero, and had good crowds just about every week. The Trocadero didn’t, and had to close.
Decades later, I ran into Del and told him it was never our intention to run him out of business. We just wanted to play.
He couldn’t have been nicer about it.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Lots of water under the bridge since then.”
Looking back, it seems like just a few years since we were carefree teenagers, playing hits of the day and freewheeling it along the highways of Idaho and Oregon in a beautiful red limousine. I wouldn’t trade the memories for anything.
Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com
