Education: Pappy’s Pupils

The effects of the Black Death* had not yet subsided, and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed, when a strange delusion arose in Germany . . . and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries. . . . It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterized, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed.

So wrote Historian J. F. C. Hecker of the great dancing mania of the 14th and 15th Centuries. By medieval standards, the square-dancing mania that possessed many a U.S. youth last week was pretty tame, but Schoolmaster Lloyd Shaw, its originator, observed hopefully that children, too, were beginning to cut loose.

Dr. Lloyd (“Pappy”) Shaw is superintendent of the famed, progressive Cheyenne Mountain public school (elementary and high-school grades) in suburban Colorado Springs, at the foot of Pike’s Peak. He is better known as the leader (“caller”) of a troupe of high-school square dancers who in the last few years have pranced from coast to coast. In their wake they left a host of square-dancing clubs and a boom in square-dance costume manufacturing.

Pappy Shaw’s hobby so impressed his fellow educators that last fortnight 97 of them went to his school, danced morning, noon & night. Headmistress Lucy Madeira. Wing, of The Madeira School for girls in Virginia, sprained her knee, but the rest went home unscathed and enthusiastic.

It all started because bowiegged, lively Dr. Shaw once coached a championship football team at Cheyenne Mountain. The school has not played football since. Dr. Shaw decided that football success made prigs of his boys and he hunted for more wholesome pastimes. He tried bronco-busting, riding, skiing, gliding, eventually chose folk dancing, at which girls could play too. He made it appeal to boys by adapting lusty, swinging cowboy dances. Today most of his high-school students goout for it. To make the first team of eight couples, which annually goes touring with Dr. Shaw, is as good as earning a letter.

His dancers wear colorful costumes—silk shirts, dungarees and cowboy boots for boys; tight-bodiced, full-skirted dresses for girls. As caller, Dr. Shaw goads them on with cowboy verses:

Turn right back on the same old trackAnd swing that gal behind you! Rope your cow and brand your calf, Swing your honey an hour and a half!

Lately a few parents have complained against overemphasis of dancing at Cheyenne Mountain, charging that girls have collapsed of exhaustion during practice, that Pappy’s troupers are away from school too much. But when Mrs. India Magnussen, mother of three pupils, ran for the school board on a platform proposing less dancing, voters mowed her down.

* For current news of the Black Death, see p. 40.