bootsdancecompany

This is the history of Boots Dance Company as recounted by one of the originating members Glenda Kennedy.

The Old Texas Ranch Restaurant opened in March 1984. Bob Weibel, an American who was in Australia working at the time, found the Ranch in April when he was looking for a live country music venue.

At that time, the theme was Bush Dancing, but Bob loved line dancing and so he used to dance in the corner doing what he loved best. Bob's fiance Nancy joined him here in Australia in June or that year and on 4th July, 1984 he and Nancy were married at the Ranch.

As time went on, more people became interested in Line Dancing and the first Line Dancing group was formed. They were called The Old Texas Dancers and they travelled with a country band called Kentucky Moonshine. Although the band disbanded in 1986, Bob and Nancy continued to teach line dancing at the Ranch.

I first went to the Ranch in October 1987 - the beginning of a long history of line dancing for myself and my family, husband Doug, daughter Alison and son Darren. We went to the Ranch every Friday and Saturday night. We helped with the cooking and after dinner we were able to dance the rest of the night away, often until 1.00 am. It was good dancing to live bands. Some of the well known singers that appeared in those days were Ann Kirkpatrick, Paul McCloud and the Snape Brothers to name but a few.

The Ranch closed in March 1988 so we went wherever we could to dance until the Ranch reopened with new owners in October 1989. At this time there were only 5 of us but it wasn't long before we had a few more dancers - enough for Nancy Weibel and I to decide to form a club. The new owners wanted us to call ourselves The Old Texas Dancers once again, but we had other ideas. Nancy suggested B.O.O.T.S which stands for Best Of Old Texas Stompers. I thought it was a great idea.

The new owners couldn't see the connection between Stompers and Dancers and when we could not reach any agreement, our group decided to leave the Ranch and find another venue. We moved into the Tarro Hotel, where our first demonstration at the Tarro Christmas lights turned out to be a great advertisement for line dancing and soon people were asking us where we had lessons.

We started teaching line dancing on Sunday afternoons at the Tarro Hotel, between the Bands' breaks.

We went to Tamworth in January, 1990 and raised money for the Earthquake Appeal. When we returned to our classes, the interest had grown so much that we started classes on a Wednesday night at the hotel. When the football season started, we had to find another venue as it was too noisy for everyone to hear us. So we moved to the Tarro Hall on Wednesday nights, but still danced at the Hotel on Sundays – they were good to our Club, letting us have raffles there and donating bottles of Scotch as prizes. This money helped to pay for the music, as our fees at this time were 50 cents!

We had grown from 10 adults and 2 juniors in January to over 30 by the end of March, 1990 and numbers continued to grow every time we did another demo. Some of us also danced at the Mayfield RSL on Friday and Saturday nights – with the interest in linedancing shown there, we started classes at the RSL on Thursday nights. When the RSL club started renovations, we had to find a new venue for this class, so in 1993 we moved to the little hall in Hamilton (and lost a few members due to the move.) We started teaching at the West Leagues Club in March, 1994 on a Sunday night, and from this venue our Thursday night class expanded so much that we had to find a new venue. I checked out the Hamilton RSL and we started there at the beginning of May, 1994 – so by this time we had classes on Wednesday at Tarro, Thursday at Hamilton and Sunday at Wests.

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