Teacher has troubles with pupils dancing 1911
Teacher Has Troubles. A Trafford City teacher evidently has her troubles with her good pupils attending dances and then not being able to handle their work the next day in the schoolroom. This is what she says, "Quite a number of girls and boys in the school here I am teaching have what I call the dance craze and I am perplexed. It is a common occurrence for them to go to dances two or three times a week, now I am not a crank, neither am I opposed to young people having a good time, but I am heartily tired of boys and girls, naturally bright and wide awake, come into class listless, absent-minded and tired, with lessons poorly prepared." As reported by the Greensburg-Morning Review, March 1911.
The popular dances from this period included the Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug, and the Bunny Hop played to Ragtime style music. So where did the Trafford youth hear the ragtime music or learn the latest dance craze in 1911? Of course, there was the stylish “Trafford Inn” at the corner of Cavitt and Fifth Street. But another establishment may have contributed. The Blackburn Building at 512 Cavitt Ave, where the first floor served as a grocery and newsstand from about 1903 to 1911. What better way to draw in the customers than to play the latest music on a phonograph? George & Clarence Reed, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the growth of Trafford, and provide a new form of entertainment, opened the Trafford Nickelodeon in 1912. Their tagline, “If you have the Blues, we can cure them.” The Reed Brothers were playing music and film in Trafford about 9 years before Frank McBride opened his theatre.
When the United States entered the Great War, the building was turned back into a grocery store and operated by one of the larger grocery chains in Western PA known as P.H. Butler Grocers, who owned at least 18 stores in Allegheny County (a photo of the building with the P.H. Butler awning appears here from November 1919). Most readers will remember this building as DiRinaldo’s Shoe Repair.
In 2017, the Trafford Historical Society held a “Ghost Walk” through the town, and invited a paranormal group from Pittsburgh to “investigate” several of the older buildings. While unconfirmed, at least two of the paranormal investigators reported “hearing music” play from the basement of the building that autumn evening. Does the Nickelodeon still mysteriously play here? The answer to that question is beyond the scope of this amateur historian. However, it was suggested that a good time was being had that evening at Dom’s Pizzeria next door.
