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In the years after World War II, the Sun Glo Ballroom stood on the Enoch Israelson place east of Hartington.
It was one of those rural gathering places where a Saturday night could be measured in polkas, shoe leather and the number of Model A’s parked along the road.
Israelson rebuilt the dance hall in 1948, but the timing was not exactly ideal. About the time Ferdinand Peitz started building the Skylon Ballroom on the southwest edge of Hartington, Israelson evidently looked at the situation and came to a practical conclusion.
Hartington did not need two dance halls.
It did, however, need someplace to bowl. That was not just a matter of recreation. Hartington’s old bowling alley had burned in May 1948, leaving local keglers with no lanes and, presumably, no socially acceptable place to complain about splits.
So Israelson converted the Sun Glo into a bowling alley. The new Sun Glo opened for bowling in September 1951, giving Hartington a new place to roll, rattle and occasionally blame the lane conditions.
The building’s second life lasted nearly two decades. In September 1969, the former dance hall turned bowling alley was again destroyed by fire. This time, the Sun Glo was not rebuilt.
It was a sad ending for a building that had tried to keep up with Hartington’s entertainment needs, even if it had to trade dance bands for bowling balls to do it.
While Hartington was sorting out whether it wanted to dance, bowl or simply avoid future building fires, other Cedar County communities were staying busy with their own September developments.
Laurel had a new business that month when George Robinson purchased Carl Jeffrey’s plumbing and heating business. Jeffrey said he would continue drilling wells and doing sewer work. Laurel also had another problem that fall — and for once it was not plumbing.
“The people of Laurel have not been bothered by flying saucers,” the Advocate reported, “but they have been bothered by flying hairpins.”
Apparently, some town boys had been using rubber bands to shoot hairpins at unsuspecting shoppers.
“This is dangerous and should not be done,” the Advocate warned.
That seems like a sentence that should not have needed to be printed, but every generation has its own educational challenges. Today we warn children about screen time. In 1947, they had to be reminded not to weaponize beauty supplies.
The Advocate added another warning: “Did you ever stop to think that on Wednesday and Saturday nights there are between 800 and 1,000 eyes on Main Street?”
These days, it is hard to imagine a time when Laurel’s Main Street had a thousand eyes on a Saturday night. Now a person could probably shoot a hairpin down Main Street and hit nothing but a parked pickup, although it still would not be recommended.
The 1947-48 school year opened Monday, Sept. 1. The student count was not complete, but Laurel had about 125 students in high school and about the same number in the grades. Thirty-two students entered the freshman class, while 16 beginners entered kindergarten.
County Superintendent J. Mike McCoy announced some rural schools had started the last week in August, while the rest opened Sept. 1. Of the county’s 115 school districts, several had not been able to hire a teacher, and 13 others were listed as having no school in 1947.
That little detail says plenty about another era in Cedar County education. Today, we talk about school consolidation. In 1947, there were still enough districts to make the county superintendent’s job look like air traffic control with chalkboards.
A total of 638 students enrolled for the fall semester at Wayne State Teachers College. Of that number, men outnumbered women, 381 to 257. That number seems surprising, considering most high school teachers and nearly all grade school teachers were women.
