Newly commissioned South Shore poster rekindles memories of Madura's Danceland in Hammond

Post-Tribune STAFF WRITER

It was easy for Danceland founder Mike Madura to draw such big names to his Hammond business. Madura's Danceland was the place to party in Northwest Indiana. It hosted dances four nights a week, along with Halloween parties and high school proms. And if you weren't there on New Year's Eve, it seemed you were the minority.

"It was a landmark. It was a meeting place," said Mike Madura's granddaughter, Marcia Madura Kozlowski. "People would come in from East Chicago, Gary and Hammond on the streetcars. The conductor would yell, 'Danceland!,' and everyone would get out. There would be no one left."

To the Maduras, Danceland was more than a business. It was part of the family.

Marcia, now 60 and living in Valparaiso, worked in the coat room from age 13 to 20. When she was 5, she'd help her father, Mickey, distribute advertising posters to businesses.

"Everyone who worked there was in the family: My cousins, my brother, my sister, my mother," Marcia said. "My grandmother sold tickets. I can still remember her in the old-fashioned ticket booth.

"It was my father's and grandfather's life. It was their passion. It had the most beautiful floor. It was all wood, and people could just glide on it. My father and grandfather had a special dance wax, and they'd wax it until it was just right."

That's why it felt like a family member died when lightning struck the Danceland on a July Sunday morning in 1967. The ballroom that anchored the Five Points intersection since 1929 burned to the ground. The family couldn't afford to rebuild it.

"It was terrible," Marcia said. "I was living in Indianapolis. We received the phone call, and I got in the car and came home. This was all my father (then 55) did from when he was 17. I didn't even know what to say to him."

Then, in June 2002, years after her grandfather and father died, Marcia received a flyer to join a South Shore Line poster club.

She signed up and began to wonder whether the Northwest Indiana Forum, which oversees creation of the Calumet Region promotional posters, would consider doing a Danceland poster. Probably not, she thought, since the other posters feature places that still exist, like the dunes, the Marquette Park lagoon, Valparaiso University and the steel mills.

But the Forum loved the idea, and Marcia and her husband commissioned Hammond artist Bruce Cegur to create the poster. Cegur had designed a South Shore poster of Wolf Lake; because Marcia grew up a mile away from the lake, that poster was one of her favorites.

Cegur worked from two black-and-white photos of the Danceland's interior and from dozens of Marcia's memories. "We had a meeting, and she told me everything she remembered -- the colors, the fabrics, the way things glowed -- and I tried to make it happen," Cegur said.

The result oozes nostalgia. Three couples glide across a gleaming dance floor under elaborate chandeliers. A band plays on stage in the background. The old Danceland banner sprawls across the top of the poster and the business's slogan, "Indiana's Most Beautiful Ballroom, with the one and only spacious, spring cushion dance floor," anchors the bottom. The dancing couple at left bears the faces of Marcia's parents -- a detail Cegur added by copying an old wedding picture.

"I tried to give the poster a flavor of the era it came from," Cegur said. "Even to people who don't remember (the Danceland), it just makes us think about romance and better, simpler times."

Marcia officially brought Madura's Danceland back to life on May 18 during a poster unveiling party at Phill Smidt's restaurant in Hammond.

It was a fitting place for the ceremony, since the Danceland sat a block south of the restaurant and her father was friends with Phill Smidt. "It was something I'd dreamed about, to create a poster," Marcia said. "(After it burned), people always wanted something tangible, a souvenir. This is a way to preserve the memory for all the people who danced there for all those years."