Yerington Monday: Bands of Yerington in the 1960’s

Yerington Monday: Bands of Yerington in the 1960’s

In last Yerington Monday comments on the bands of the Sabras and the Quids were brought up so I decided to share some old photos of those bands.  The lead singer of the Sabras was Sue Hatton, who was a close personal friend as we were raised together.  Our mothers were friends and fellow nurses since WWII.  Sue had a powerful voice and wild personality. Her signature song was “The House of New Orleans”.  The lead guitar player, Ray Villines was a gifted lead guitar player and the leader of the band.  This band entered the Battle of the Bands and came in third place.

The Quids was also a band in Yerington.  They often used our living room to practice. They were good, but not as popular as the Sabras.

We were progressive in Yerington in the 1960’s and had one of a few all girl bands called the Fretfuls.

In the sixties, if you had a dance you had to get adult chaperones.  Bobby Evans’s father was one of the many chaperones to make our dances possible.

Note:  There are ten pictures here, to view them all, click on one and then use the arrows to view the others.

At the Class of 1966’s 66th Birthday Party last year, I read a story about an occurrence at one of these dances.  If you are interested, I have posted the story, “Rumble At Anaconda Lookout”.  

thecrackerladyshouse.blogspot.com/2015/03/rumble-at-anaconda-lockout.html

The Sabras Susan Hatton, Ray, Villines, Tom, Rodney, Gary Glick, & Bill Reseck.

The Sabras Susan Hatton, Ray, Villines, Tom, Rodney, Gary Glick, & Bill Reseck.

The Sabras at Breakout TV Show in Reno 1965. Susan Hatton, Ray, Villines, Tom, Rodney, Gary Glick, & Bill Reseck.

Ron Murray & Terry Cox's at The Breakout TV program in Reno, 1965 with the Sabra's. Susan Hatton, Ray, Villines, Tom, Rodney, Gary Glick, & Bill Reseck.

Sabra's Band Logo

The Fretfuls at TV Breakout show in Reno. Kathy Taylor, Linda Turner, Roxie Hall & Letty Domenici with MC Mike Maribabeli,

The Quids at VFW Hall dance The Quids: Dennis & Wesley Gilbert, Richard Tooley and Bobby Evans on drums

The Quids: Dennis & Wesley Gilbert, Richard Tooley and Bobby Evans on drums practicing in my living room.

Bobby Evans, drummer for the Quids.

Mr. Evans, chaperone Bobby Evan’s father

Yerington Monday: John’s Fine Food

Yerington Monday: John’s Fine Food

Every time I return home to Yerington and take a drive down Main Street, I feel a big hole in my heart when I pass the building that use to be John’s Fine Food.  It is now an insurance company.  It looks so dead, so plain, so blah.  As a kid in Yerington, John’s was a hub of the community.  It was full of life and fun.  It was breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It was where all the businessmen came for a coffee break.  It was where single miners, construction workers and cowboys came for dinner.  If they came for breakfast, we would make them a bag lunch and put it on their tab. Yes, regulars could charge their meals.  It was where families would go for special occasions or a weekend dinner treat.

John’s was like the Boys & Girls Club of our day.  As teenagers we would go for coffee and sweet rolls before school.  At lunch we walked to John’s for a lunch of hamburgers and homemade french fries. On Friday & Saturday nights we would hangout and watch our friends drag Main Street.  It was the “place” to go after the game. We often danced to the jukebox.  There was two pinball machines, if you got bored.  And if you were 21, there were two slot machines that were “tight as hell”.  Yes, John’s was a happening place in those days.  Now it sits like a tombstone on top of a grave.

When I was fifteen, I lied and told John I was sixteen (as that was the legal as to hire minors) when I applied for a position as a dishwasher.  I worked for him until the day before I left for college in September 1966.  By the time I was really sixteen, I was waiting tables.  I worked lunch hour and after school.  In the summers, I worked full time.  Both my brothers, Dan and Dave, worked for John as dishwashers as well.

 
Scookie John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Shannon, my boyfriend John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1965

Boys at the pinball machines John's Cafe Yerington NV Aug 1965

Sue Johnson, Red Hatton , Sue Hatton , Gayle, Chuck Parrot John's Cafe Yerington NV 1964

Qwen & Sue Hatton John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1965

Sue Hatton & Tom Rodney John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1965

Gayle B, Chere Barnett and Cindy Franks John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Band Boys of the Centurions from Reno with Wesley Gilbert of the Quids John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1965

Waitress John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Chere Brown & Linda Steel horsing around John's Cafe Yerington NV 1964

Waitress John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1964

Sharon Andrews John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Louise, the cook John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Sue Hatton, Mike, Richard John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Naomi, John's wife John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Ron Carey teasing a customer John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Terry & ?? John's Cafe Yerington NV Aug 1964

Terri John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1964

Terry and Chere Brown having pie fight, John's Cafe Yerington, NV 1965

John Young, owner John's Cafe Yerington NV Sept 1964

Mary Hood & Gale B, John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1964

Linda Steele, John's Cafe Yerington NV Oct 1964

Waitress John's Cafe Yerington NV Sept 1964

Chere Barnett John's Cafe Yerington, NV 1964

Gayle & Sookie John's Cafe Yerington NV March 1965

John Young & Terry John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Steady Customer and Chere Barnett,  John's Cafe Yerington, Nevada 1965

Louise, the cook John's Cafe Yerington NV 1965

Dawnette Humes and me John's Cafe Yerington, Nevada August 1964

There was a few months of unemployment from John’s, when he fired me for asking for a raise.  I wrote about this on my blog on how I was fired and rehired. See below.

How The Flu Helped Get Me To College

http://thecrackerladyshouse.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-flu-helped-get-me-to-college.html

When I first started washing dishes for John, this song was played on the jukebox almost hourly.  Everytime I hear it I am transported to the back kitchen of John’s, where I was either washing dishes or peeling a 100-lb sack of potatoes for those famous french fries.

Dusty Springfield - Wishin & Hopin 1964

https://youtu.be/gAdTsAKvVTU

Yerington Stories: Rumble At Anaconda Lockout by Chere L Brown

Yerington Stories: Rumble At Anaconda Lockout

by Chere L Brown

The 1965 Saturday night dances in Yerington,  Nevada became my responsibility quite by accident.  

My best friend, Sue, was a dynamic personality and had a powerful voice. She and four other high school classmates formed a band called the Sabras , but they had no place to practice. Our living room just happened to be very large, and so it became the band practice spot and hangout. My mother worked late, so at first I neglected to even tell her of my afternoon activities, but when she did find out, to my surprise she was supportive.  

As the band improved they started talking about performing. They decided they needed a band manager to help get them some gigs.  Sue at this point volunteered me. I was fifteen years old. I did not have a clue about finding the band engagements, but I was working on the school newspaper that year and so promoted them with little news articles.

It finally occurred to me, to rent the VFW hall and have a town dance.

Because Yerington was a small town where everyone knew everyone and because my mother was the hospital administrator and because I had a reputation of being “a very responsible young lady”, I was able to rent halls, enlist chaperons and get the police to give us their help and blessing.

For two years, the Sabras and another band, the Quids, whom I had started managing,

performed twice a month at town dances, proms, and parties. The Sabras performed at the battle of the bands in Reno, coming in third place and performed on KOLO TV.  Sue “Hot Lips” Hatton had such a powerful voice that when one night at a dance while she was singing “The House Of the Rising Sun” the microphone went out. She kept belting out her song and was still heard over the drums, electric guitars and the shuffling feet of about 75 dancing couples. At a KOLO recording session, when she started singing the sound technicians grabbed their headsets and threw them on the desk. They came running on the set to adjust the mikes and instruct Sue on how to hold the mike far away from her mouth to keep from destroying their eardrums.

As I approached my senior year, I had gotten quite good at arranging town dances and promoting them with fliers and newspaper articles both in the school paper and the local paper, who’s logo was “the only paper that gives a damn about Yerington”. As summer was wearing down, I rented the Eagle’s Roost for a back-to-school dance.  I did my usual promotion and was expecting a good turnout. The turnout was even better than I hoped for.  

About half way through the dance four surprise visitors come in. They were black soldiers from the naval base in Hawthorne located about 60 miles away.  We were at the height of the Vietnam War and there was a large ammunition depot in Hawthorne.  They had read about the dance in the paper and driven all that distance for a little recreation. Now Yerington at that time had only one black person in the town, a lab technician, who my mother had hired. No one in town would rent to her, so the county rented her the apartment above us. She may have been the only black person who had ever lived in Yerington up to that point.  

Needless to say, the farm and miner boys did not take kindly to these black boys asking their dates to dance. Many of the girls did dance with them. They were very good dancers. After about an hour of “tolerance”, the white boys could take it no longer and challenged then to a fight.

The dance came to a halt as everyone grabbed their coats and purses and headed for a well known local spot, the Anaconda Copper Pit Lookout, an open pit copper mine viewpoint, for the fight.  As cars and trucks sped out of the parking lot, I left the chaperons to close up the dance  as I caught a ride to the pit.  I was scared what might happen and felt responsible if someone got hurt since it was my dance.

By the time I arrived at the lookout, there were about forty vehicles parked helter-skelter.  The four black soldiers had their back to the pit with a 200-foot drop. Their trunk was open and they pulled out some chains and a crowbar. One had a small pocketknife and another had a church key with the pointed end out. Slowly approaching them were about twenty-five white boys with their fists up in Cassius Clay style. Some of the football team took their tackling positions.  This was going to be a war of two types of fighting styles: clean vs. street, rednecks vs. rumblers.

My heart was sinking as I realized someone was surely going to get hurt. I was trying to reason with them to stop but to no avail.  As name-calling prevailed the spectators rooted, yelled for action, some girls cried.  

Suddenly a pickup truck roared up the gravel road and came to a screeching dust encasing stop. A sixteen-year-old farmer’s son jumped out and retrieved his 22 rifle from the rear window gun rack and headed to the line of skirmish. “Oh my God, he is going to shoot those black guys!” I panicked.

Before I could take another breath, he discharged his gun in the air and was shouting for everyone to leave before the police came. He really didn’t have to tell them, because at the sound of the gun’s boom, there was a mass exodus to the cars. The jackrabbits could not have out run them as they scurried down the lookout road in a cloud of dust that made the atomic bomb look tame. Thus ended the one and only rumble in Mason Valley to my knowledge.

The black soldiers were never again seen in Yerington. Sue moved to California shortly after the rumble, as did one of the other band members, one joined the Navy and headed for Vietnam, and thus ended my band management career. I was now 17 years old and preparing for college.