The Marian Ballroom was on 79th Street and Dupont in Bloomington.  We set out to find it, but there was no 79th Street and no ballroom to be found.  Then it hit me – that old Knights of Columbus Hall just might have been the Marian Ballroom years ago.  I stuck my head in and asked, and Bingo!  (Which is what they were playing at the time.)

Turned out it was the Marian Chapter of the K of C, and they rented out their ballroom to different groups for dances – still do!  Back in the early-to-mid ‘sixties, someone organized teen dances featuring local groups like the Underbeats, the Del Counts, the High Spirits, and who knows – maybe even the Trashmen.  On other nights, Willie Peterson had the house band, playing music for our parents.

Back many decades ago, my husband somehow made his way to Bloomington from Edina before he could drive to dance the night away.  But the music died – at least for teens – he remembers, when the boys started fighting.  The last straw was when Cary Tarbox, a tough guy from Richfield, broke a cop’s jaw in four places.  We looked up Cary on Ancestry.com – he went to Vietnam, came back, and died at age 30.

Anyway, here are some pictures from our trip to the Marian in June 2017.  Steve says the ballroom is a total time capsule, exactly the same as it was when it was built in 1957.  (The building itself is different – an addition was built on the east side and a second floor built since then.)  It’s now also called the Bloomington Events Center, and 79th Street is now American Blvd., but inside, it’s the Marian Ballroom.

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