You Got to Dance with Who Brung You

“You got to dance with who brung you, swing with who swung you.  Don't be a fickle fool…'cause in the long run you'll have more fun, if you dance with who brung you to the bash…

                                                                                              Asleep at the Wheel

     I’m guessing the night Walter Winchell and Slug Gillespie got into a fight over me at the Elks club dance was in mid July, 1960.  I was home in Elko after finishing my freshman year of college at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  Walter, at the family ranch in Starr Valley, had completed his senior year of high school in Wells.

       Walter was one of the reasons my junior year at Wells high school was memorable.  It had seemed like a teenager’s tragedy, moving from our house on a tree-lined street in Elko to the dusty Marble ranch headquarters in Deeth, riding the schoolbus twenty-five miles to Wells to attend a zone B high school.  After all, Elko was four A. 

     As it turned out, being the new girl in a high school with eighty-nine students was more fun than I could have imagined. I was voted homecoming queen;  teacher’s pet in Miss Minnis Alderman’s English class; had the lead in the school play; played xylophone in the marching band; was best friends with Dorothy, Midge, and Sally, seniors and cheerleaders for the Wells High Leopards.   And Walter was my boyfriend.  The slight drawback was that he was a sophomore.  We were teased a little about the grade difference.  Someone at school said, “So, you’re dating your mother.”

     Walter was really cute.  He had black curly hair, fine features, and, like most ranch boys,  an athletic build from doing chores, bucking hay in the summers, riding and roping. Once, during a heavy make-out session I let him put his hand down my shirt around my breast.  That was a first for me.  Him too, I bet.  One time when Walter brought me back to the ranch, Mom said I shouldn’t be sitting so close to him.  I’m sure Walter had been driving with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right arm locked around my neck.  That’s how it was done in those days.

      I know we stayed in touch after I moved back to Elko for my senior year and during my first year at the U,  because I found three letters from him. In one he says, “I reckon college must be a lot of fun.”   One dated Dec. 14, 1959, “I received your letter today.”  His closings were affectionate:  “Thinking of you always, Love, Walter” and “with all my Love, Walt xoxo.” 

     Here’s my conjecture about that July night.  I think Walter called me from the ranch and said he and friends were coming in to the Silver State Stampede.   Did I want to go to the dance at the Elks Club after the rodeo?  The Elks Club was next door to Sewell’s Market on the corner of Sixth and Idaho Streets.  You went through an inconspicuous door on the Idaho street side and  up a narrow stairwell opening to a large room with a high ceiling, dusty transom windows and a wood floor that creaked.  There must have been a band, probably a three-piece combo like the Ruby Valley Wranglers.  I remember a crowded room and the comings and goings, like the dances at Jiggs or Lee or Taylor Canyon, where folks went out to their cars, couples to neck, cowboys to pass a bottle of Jim Beam.

     I remember dying to dance with Slug’s older brother, Dallas Gillespie, who had completed his first year at West Point. I must have ignored Walter.   I suppose I danced with Slug.  He was not a romantic interest, just a fun-loving kid from Wells who had a really cool older brother.  My guess is that they also went down to their cars in the parking lot next to Sewells and were passing a bottle of whiskey or drinking Lucky Lager. 

     At some point, someone came up to me and said, “Walter and Slug are in a fist fight out in the parking lot.  Aren’t you gonna come down?”  What was the assumption?  That I would break up the fight.  Take sides.  Just watch.  I remember staying upstairs until I heard Walter had left.  Then I went home.

     The next time I saw Walter was probably fifty years later at the Elko County Fair. I’m guessing 2009 or 2010.  I  had moved Mom to Highland Village, the assisted living facility in Elko.  When I would come into town from Tuscarora I enjoyed spending time in Elko with Al Steninger, hearing  his and Dad’s stories about ranch brokering and range management in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.  Also during fairtime,  Al  would give me a pass so I could sit in the Nevada Range Service box, a coveted  spot to watch the horse races and the stock horse events.  

      The Nevada Range Service box was across the aisle from the Winchells’.  I was getting up to go bet on a race and Walter was about to enter their box.  We looked right at one another.  There was no invitation in his face to say hello.  I never said a word.  Mind you, we were in our seventies!  

     I never saw Walter again, although I often went to the Elko County Fair,  sat in the same box across from the Winchells, and observed his trim, lively wife and several young adults and children enjoying each other’s company.  For many years, Walter served as chair of the Elko County Fair Board.   I wondered if it was Fair business that accounted for his absence from the family box or if he was avoiding me.    My sister said,  “Maybe he just didn’t recognize you.”

      I had always thought it was because I broke his heart and he held a grudge. For the longest time I felt a need to apologize  for my behavior that night, still viewing my actions as the first in a long line of feckless female behavior, not “dancing with the one who brung me” and definitely not going home with him.  

     At eighty, I have a different perspective regarding Walter’s grudge and my urge to apologize.  It has to do with the sexual revolution that hadn’t yet happened.  In Elko and elsewhere, the Sixties were still the Fifties. The birth control pill may have been invented in 1960, but it’s good to remember that it wasn’t until 1972 that single women gained the right to obtain and use birth control.  1972, mind you.

     Teen courtship was intense. Our sex drive was just as strong as the boys,’ but the consequence of “going all the way” in the backseat of a Chevy with the wrong male was likely to be shame or a shotgun wedding.

      For males, attracting females was instinctively competitive.  The virile young ranch boy

 who faced the humiliation of rejection reacted in a natural way–getting into a fight with a perceived rival, or at least his brother.

      I think my actions that night took him by surprise.   I don’t think I broke his heart.  I do think that bitter taste of rejection stayed with him. Yet my actions were as instinctive as his. I did not intend to ignore “the one who brung me” nor to flirt with Slug’s eligible brother.  I certainly had no conscious understanding of the female’s  biological imperative to find what my parents’ generation might have referred to as a “good provider.”

      The irony is that in 2023 some feminist authors, such as British journalist, Mary Harrington, complain that in “de-risking sex, this technology[the pill] has made it ubiquitous, and in the process stripped desire of anticipation, excitement and mystery: emptied it of eroticism.  In its place we’re offered an increasingly coarse, commodified and grotesque landscape of all-you-can-eat-lust.”  As early as 1984, feminist pioneer Germaine Greer noted that “unfettered access to sexual relations might make both men and women feel less sexually interested in one another.”

      Perhaps that’s why the intensity of that night over half a century ago stayed with each of us.   I’ll never know.  Reading his obituary in the Elko Daily Free Press, I learned that Walter died February 8, 2021.    It is clear from his obituary that Walter lived and shared  a good life on the ranch he loved with a devoted wife, and a son and daughter, four grandchildren. It seems right that in his obit it was noted that “he met his wife at a roping in Wells.”