This information and so many more interesting factoids about the rock and roll years of the legendary ballroom between 1959 and 1981 is now at your fingertips in a book written and compiled by Okoboji, Iowa musicologist and co-founder of the Iowa Rock N’ Roll Music Association, Tom Tourville.
“The base for this thing is, everybody wants to remember the songs, the music,” Tourville said.
Tourville who is also a columnist, including monthly for the Pipestone County Star has written 28 books about rock and roll across the Midwest, but only two of those are about the delivery system of the times: the ballrooms. His first ballroom book was about the Roof Garden Ballroom on Lake Okoboji, Iowa. The second is his latest release, the “Hollyhock Ballroom: Rocking’ at Hatfields’ Hollyhock Ballroom, 1959-1981, the Rock N’ Roll Years.”
“Those were the two that had the most legend tied to them for different reasons,” Tourville said.
It was a tale of two ballrooms, as Tourville tells it, with the Roof Garden enjoying a more refined version of the Hollyhock’s bad-boy aura. The reputation was a sign of the times. Rock and roll was dangerous to stage due to blowback from churches and towns. The Hollyhock was fearless.
“So in ’59 when most ballrooms weren’t even booking rock and roll because it was so dangerous, they were doing four a month,” Tourville said. “They were so far ahead of the rock and roll curve.”
It wasn’t just the Hollyhock that gave Hatfield and Pipestone a place in Midwest rock and roll history, and Tourville explains why. Number one: “If you lived in Pipestone you were in an epicenter of rock and roll because of all the ballrooms (in the surrounding area), and they were the delivery system,” Tourville said. “You were standing in rock and roll Valhalla.”
Number two: “Pipestone was very fortunate. All the stars aligned and produced two bands out of one town. Most towns don’t get even one good band. Pipestone got two legendaries: The Starfires and the Pilgrims.”
The final ingredient? Jimmy Thomas, a booking agent out of Luverne who owned a ballroom in Lake Benton. “He booked more than probably any other human being for a two-decade period.”
Tourville’s 100-page book is loaded with over 1,000 groups and artists who featured at the Hollyhock, as well as other factoids, photos and bits of information. The foreward is written by Myron Lee, of Myron Lee & the Caddies, and there’s a special profile of Orin Hunstad of Jasper. Born in 1940 and stricken with polio at the age of seven, Hunstad’s confinement to a wheelchair didn’t stop
“It’s jaw-dropping, hard to comprehend what he did,” Tourville said.
Tourville’s books are technically considered discographies, or the chronological history of discs or recorded music, similar to the books put out annually that compile all the weekly Billboard charts.
“It’s the same concept,” Tourville said. “I just did them on really small niche markets, state-by-state.”
This latest book took three years to research.
“This was the most difficult book I’ve ever done because it (the Hollyhock) never advertised in newspapers,” he said. “If you can get newspaper archives, you can build a story for decades.”
Instead, Tourville fit the puzzle pieces together through pocket cards that were given with tickets, through collectors, and through the National Ballroom Operators Association that kept data on the money that was made and the bands that played.
“It’s crazy research, but for me, that’s what I enjoy the most,” he said.
Tourville doesn’t cover the Hollyhock from its inception in 1931 when Don and Effie Shadeck converted an old garage and blacksmith shop into a local Hatfield dance hall. Neither does he cover the ballroom’s big band, old time or polka periods. His is strictly a book on rock and roll, the music that captured him as a boy growing up in Fairmont, Minn.
“I’ve always had a fascination with the music business,” Tourville said. “I had no aspirations to be a musician, but I was fascinated by that sphere. It wasn’t what you’d see on the stage, but the business side, what was going on behind the scenes, how they got there, how they got booked, how they made their records.”
That fascination would drive him to work his way through college at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, as a booking agent for a Minneapolis agency. He cut his teeth in band promotion as the agency’s one-man college division.
“Every four months they’d give me four national acts to find stages for and it was my job to get them booked into colleges and ballrooms,” he said stages like the Hollyhock Ballroom in little Hatfield, Minn.
Despite his college-year work, he spent his adult career in nonprofit management for institutions in places like Chambers of Commerce and Performing Arts Centers. His discographies have always been a hobby.
“This is my golf game, how I relax,” he said. “I love music, music research, and it’s so much fun to see the reaction when you put that out.”
For inquiries about the book or to contact Tourville, go to www.tomsmidwestpublications.com, email tourvillea@aol.com or call 712-332-7013 evenings. The book can be purchased at select local establishments, including the Pipestone Publishing office.
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