Ironically, just this past winter, a friend lent me a book detailing the history of “rock and roll” in Minnesota. The mystery of the infamous night club would continue to haunt me for decades. No one had any recollection of the drowning tragedy of 1955.
In the years when I lived on a houseboat at Harriet Island I asked some of the old-timers about the club and about all they could recall was a marina located beneath the Mendota Bridge, where the old ferry used to run and where you could once rent canoes and small fishing boats. For years I searched the riverbank on both sides of the river but could discern no clearing, no overgrown parking lot, no crumbling foundation where any sort of building might have stood. He swore it was right beneath the Mendota Bridge, just upstream of the town. “Where exactly was this night club?” I remember asking my father on many occasions, especially after I started working on the river and made countless trips up the Minnesota. In reality, only one of the six women survived, but in an interesting twist of fate - my father’s favorite part of the story - that one surviving woman wound up marrying her rescuer. In seconds the night club emptied out and in my father’s telling I imagined brave young sailors or men dressed in tuxedoes diving recklessly beneath the ice-clogged river to save the women. He claimed the car came to rest with its nose pointing up, the headlights shining eerily up through the water. But now I realize that’s quite impossible he had four kids at home in 1955 and was struggling to make ends meet.Īs he told it, six young women filed out of the club at closing time, hurried through the falling snow to pile into their car, then proceeded to skid off the slippery edge of the parking lot and plunge ten feet down the bank into the icy Minnesota River below. For many years, in fact, I believed that he had actually been in attendence on the night in question, so vivid was his recollection of the details. I don’t doubt for a minute that he had hoisted a beer or two in the very night club described in the story, as he seemed to have intimate knowledge of its location. In his version - and I should mention here that my father was a gifted storyteller, his voice often rising dramatically at key moments, his recollection of the facts perhaps only a little embellished - the women were all young and beautiful and were out for a night on the town in old Mendota, a town just across the river from the Naval Air Station where he had served during the war. The story was one I had known about for years – my whole life actually – as it had been one that my own father used to tell when we were kids. In any event, before departing, David left me with a copy of his latest piece, a story about a tragic accident in November of 1955 in which five young women drowned in the Minnesota River: Thankfully, Mr Byrne departed before we started the tape, as it proved to be a bit more revealing than any of us cared to admit. Liz even brought along a scratchy old VHS tape of the final Halloween party at Lilydale Marina, circa 1981, in which all the members present were some thirty-five years younger and in the prime of their river-rat lives.
The dinner party turned out to be a huge success with Mr Byrne getting a lot more than he bargained for in stories, photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings. Jan did him one better she invited him to join us for dinner last Wednesday with old Lilydale denizens Steve and Liz Kemper, as well as Tom and Dolly O’Rourke. Mr Byrne asked if we might be willing to answer a few questions. Jan once lived aboard her houseboat “El Barco” at Lilydale Marina and the photos were of her annual spring launching. He was researching a piece about old Lilydale Marina and in an internet search had come across some photos I posted a few years ago in my “Dead Reckoning” blog. Just recently we received an interesting email from David Byrne, a trustee with the Dakota County Historical Society.