Changing times bring down the Flying V
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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
UTICA — Even with the overhead lights on, it’s a dimly lit place where that you-and-me intimacy, that soft midnight charm, still lingers in the empty mapled corners.
Kenny Volzke stares into the dimness, searching for the memories that made the Flying V Ballroom such a special place for him, his wife, Stella, and for their guests gliding softly to the sounds of “Moonlight Serenade” and other big-band classics.
But don’t interpret the long silences between questions and answers as indecision about what to do now, a year after the music finally died two miles south of Utica.
Listen, and you hear finality.
“I locked the doors after every dance and every party that we had here for 35 years,” said a widowed wisp of a man clad in bib overalls.
“And I think that’s long enough.”
Thirty-six years after band leaders Tiny Little and Dan Hamsa mounted the stage for the first Saturday and Sunday dances, Volzke has summoned the auctioneer.
Sunday at 11 a.m., the fading rhythms of waltzes, fox trots and polkas will give way to the rhythmic cadence of buying and selling.
“The younger ones didn’t go for ballroom dancing,” Volzke said. “And the older ones couldn’t go no more.”
The list of familiar Flying V fixtures is long, many of them associated with the buffet line weekend crowds that moved through before that first dance.
White china with gold edging. A walk-in cooler. A refrigerated pie case.
Two hundred-pound halibut trucked over from Lincoln were a frequent dinner feature.
“You had to cut them in order to lift them,” Volzke said, managing a hint of a smile.
The dance floor and the building itself, stoutly made of poured concrete and tornado-tough, are not for sale.
“It would make a good shop or a good factory or a good storage building,” said its owner, who combined a ballroom business with 50 years of drilling wells, fixing irrigation pumps, building trailers and related tasks.
Whatever happens with the building, he wants to be the guy that pulls the trigger on it, but he hasn't decided yet what to try to do.
The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra played at the Flying V in 1977. Guy Lombardo’s band was there in 1979.
“We always had a New Year’s Eve party.”
On New Year’s Eve and through the rest of the year, “we’d get everybody started and then we’d join the crowd.”
Myron Floren and the Lawrence Welk Orchestra came three times, from 1972 forward.
“I always said I would get the Lawrence Welk band to Utica.”
Welk himself never put in an appearance. “He needed another $10,000 if he had come here.”
One of the distinguishing attributes of the Flying V was the runway that occasional pilot Volzke built next to it with 2,500 yards of concrete. He recalls as many as 35 planes lined up outside.
Flying was sometimes the safer means of travel.
“A lot of times the roads would get icy and we had a big band coming in a bus. And they made it all right, but the customers didn’t make it.”
Former area farmer and ballroom ticket-seller Hubert Gloystein remembers guests who would fly in for dining and dancing.
“I know of one couple from western Nebraska that would fly in on Saturday afternoon,” said Gloystein, now 80. “When the crowds kept getting less and less, they finally changed (the dance) to Sunday night.”
Barbara Rhodes married one of the Flying V bouncers. Their wedding dance is her favorite memory of what went on there.
“We still listen to the Lawrence Welk show every week,” she said.
Gloystein lost his favorite polka partner, his wife, Eileen, in 2003.
Sunday, he and others who heard the hits from the 1930s and 1940s, reached for a partner’s hand, and hurried onto the floor, will sense another loss.
“It’s too bad that this is happening,” he said of the auction, “but I guess that’s how times change.”
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.
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karwied wrote on September 15, 2007 9:00 am: