At the Willowbrook Ballroom, love was always in the air

Chicago Tribune

09-02-2025

The Willowbrook Ballroom had the girth of an airport hangar, but its reason for being was inspired by Valentine's Day's three little words: 'I love you.'
In 1985, a Tribune editor sent me to check out a publicist's release about a Sunday-afternoon gathering at the longtime landmark in southwest suburban Willow Springs.
'It is billed as an over-40 dance,' said a fox-trotting patron I talked to. 'But over 60 more accurately describes most of us.'
Those taking to the floor that day had obviously said to themselves, 'You're only as old as you think you are.' They weren't put off by the nearness of death, or the possibility of it coming during an energetic swirl around the dance floor. So what? They would die with familiar lyrics on their lips.
Not long before my visit, a 71-year-old had collapsed during the over-40 dance, the apparent victim of a fatal heart attack.
'Even as the paramedics were wheeling the stretcher out the front door, trombonist Will Carroll gave his sidemen the downbeat and the Sunday-afternoon tea dance picked up right where it had left off,' I reported.
The Willowbrook's ambience encouraged senior citizens who had been widowed or divorced not to despair. It's never too late to start over again.
'What can I tell you?' Bill Domina, 66, told me. 'Now and then it's still the same old story: Boy meets girl.'
Albert Hauser explained how he met his late wife at a dance. After she died, the Willowbrook provided a place of solace.
'The band was playing 'The Waltz You Saved for Me,' when Martha and I first set eyes on each other,' Hauser, 76, recalled. 'Then three years ago, she just went to sleep one night and never got up again. So now I come here to drown my sorrows.' Carol Werkmeister, 69, and Marty Costanza, 75, dance at the Willowbrook Ballroom in Willow Springs on Dec. 5, 2004. (José M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)[/caption]
Violet Fontanetta was widowed after 30 years of marriage. Initially, she wasn't getting out much. 'Then one day it dawned on me that I was still among the living,' she told me. 'I was scared to death the first time I walked through the place's front door.'
From his elevated perch on the bandstand, Carroll watched Tea Dance newcomers. They found a partner on the stag benches, as they're dubbed. Once a couple came together, they wrapped their arms around each other and gracefully glided through the side-step-close movements of classic ballroom dancing.
When the music stopped, each might look for another partner. Or they might stick with the same one. 'Then one Sunday they'll dance over to announce their engagement, saying they wanted Carroll to be the first to know,' I wrote in that 1985 story.
To celebrate the ballroom's 60th year a few years before my 1985 visit, Peter Duchin's band, a high-society East Coast favorite, was brought in to replace Carroll's band. His style did not work for the Midwestern crowd.
'Duchin started off playing bouncy tunes and the audience gathered around the bandstand to boo every number,' said Dick Williams, the Willowbrook's manager. 'So at intermission we had to set him straight about what our folks like.'
They wanted to glide around a dance floor 'while a coronet player slowly teases a mute in and out of his instrument's brass throat and the trombone section pumps line-ending accents to a torch song's sentiments,' I wrote back then.
They also wanted to hear a melancholy note or two. Duchin's bouncy upbeat belied their experience that love is rarely unadulterated joy. But the lyrics of 'Poor Butterfly,' a dance band favorite, tells the story of a Japanese lover foredoomed by her unfaithful American sailor.
Indeed, love is oft times falsely advertised.
'While we're dancing, they love to go on and on about big cars,' said Jo Anne Devine. But when we get out to the parking lot, how all those Cadillacs have shrunk to Fords and Plymouths.'
Men had similar gripes.
A lot of these widows pretend they're here looking for love,' Glen Behrens told me. 'But they don't fool me for a moment — they just want to find themselves a new handyman.'
The scene of those tragedies and satires was founded by John Verderbar. Having made a fortune in real estate and insurance, he bought five wooded acres along Archer Avenue, where he intended to build a weekend home. But his son Rudy Verderbar, having danced at an outdoor pavilion in Michigan, besieged his father to build a similar venue.
So they compromised: Verderbar built the dance pavilion but initially didn't serve liquor. Considering that booze lubricates romantic encounters, the success of Verderbar's venue, initially called Oh Henry Park, was remarkable. Destroyed by fire in 1930, he hired 200 carpenters to rebuild another pavilion in time for the next weekend's dance. The following year, the cavernous indoor ballroom was built.
Verderbar's dance floor was superbly engineered. Had its supports been too thin, it could collapse under the weight of 1,000 dancers. Too thick, it would feel stiff. The trusses he designed had a little give. Bouncing back, they provided a dancer a bit of a lift to the next step.
The structure was roofed over, and food service was established. If a band wasn't booked when a banquet was catered, extra tables would be set up on the dance floor. But the Willowbrook was patently a dance hall offering food, not a restaurant with a dance floor.
'Many of our regulars have been here a lot longer than I have,' Williams said in 1985. 'So they think of the place as more theirs than mine.'
In the 1920s and1930s, the Willowbook booked big-name bands like Count Basie and Artie Shaw. That resumed in the mid 1940s when young people, anxious to make up for time lost in World War II, were looking for romantic partners.
But shortly, their dance preferences changed. Willowbrook added salsa and other Latin dances. Eventually also rock 'n' roll, which to a ballroom-dancing fan seems the devil's own handiwork.
Instead of following in the graceful steps of their predecessors, young people jumped up and down like they had the proverbial ants in their pants. A dancer would bob and weave yards distant from a partner.
'Can ballroom dancing survive the era of the frug, Watusi and monkey?' the Tribune asked in 1966.
It survived those fads, but not another devastating fire in October 2016, which left the storied ballroom in ruins.
At a gathering of Willowbrook stalwarts in Chicago Ridge two years later, vocalist Peter Obrisko attributed ballroom dancing's decline to changing priorities — everyone is too busy holding a phone to hold a dance partner, he told a columnist for the Daily Southtown.
After the October 2016 fire, some of those who danced there gathered around its ashes.
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A fire destroyed the popular Willowbrook Ballroom in Willow Springs in late October 2016. (Gary Middendorf/for the Chicago Tribune)
'I danced here every Sunday for the last 11 years,' John Consier told the Tribune. He courted his wife at Willowbrook in 1949. She died in 1981.
'Then about 11 years ago, I met a lovely lady and we would come here to dance,' Consier said. She had died the previous July, but he continued to attend the Sunday dances.
'His dance card would get filled up pretty quickly,' Consier's son said.
Betty Moe recalled her Oak Lawn High School prom in 1961 at Willowbrook.
'We feel this like a death in the family,' she said.
I understand how she felt. Every Valentine's Day I'm flooded with memories of the Willowbrook Ballroom .
If I'm driving, I'll turn off the radio and listen to a song that has reverberated in my inner ear ever since I visited the dance hall, 40 years ago.
A muted trumpet and trombones set the key. A vocalist steps up to a microphone and once again, and ever so faintly, I hear the final verse of 'Poor Butterfly':
For once Butterfly she gives her heart away,
She can never love again she is his for aye,
Through all of this world, For ages to come,
So her face just smiles, tho' her heart is growing numb.