by Peter Twitchell
It was at the Cowan Hut, owned by the City of Bethel, we had our “Electric Era” Band play for the community at large. People flooded into Bethel to dance from Tuluksak, Akiak, Akiachak, Kwethluk, Napaskiak, Oscarville, Napakiak, and the Tundra villages like Kasigluk and Nunapitchuk because they were close by in the summer fishcamping.
Going to a dance was to take a well-deserved break from fishcamping, which took up most of the teenagers’, as well as the adults’, time – cutting fish, soaking fish in brine, and hanging them on the fish rack to begin the drying process before smoking the fish for a whole week or two. Then preparing to store it for winter.
Due to the Bethel curfew we could only play as a band for 3 hours tops, from 9pm to midnight! And we did!
When I found a high school girl wiling to take money at the gate I gave her instructions to take $2.00 from everyone. The Cowan Hut, which had been the gym floor for the grade schools K-8 at the log building was a gymnasium for grades 9-12 high school basketball games.
At the end of three hours kids were to go home. Kids were old enough to dance through grade 12. Our chaperone was Police Chief Tom Dillon. We paid the gatekeeper $50.00 bucks. Dillon set aside $20 for the rent of the Cowan Hut.
The Band made four stacks of currency: $1.00, $5.00, $10.00, and $20.00 bills. The Band: Nick Dull, Stan Nevak, Peter Twitchell, and Mutt Jung averaged $500.00 per band member on those weekends. From the figures there was easily a thousand people in attendance.
That was $2.00 per person that came to the dance and if we played Friday night and Saturday night we got $500 each. We always played Friday and Saturday and made $250 per night.
