It began with a conversation among friends on a Facebook page with the the title, “You Know You’re From Pell City AL If…”

You know you’re from Pell City if you remember the bowling alley, the Ice House, the roller skating rink.  You know you’re from Pell City if you remember when you could pull up behind The Ark and “mash” a button to buy bonded whiskey in a dry county.  You know you’re from Pell City if you remember the drag strips, the homemade whiskey makers and the football games, the band bus, the Rexall Soda Fountain, Sam’s and then Skad’s Drive-In.  “You Know You’re From Pell City AL If…” has about 1500 members now.  You know you’re from Pell City if you remember when Pell City had a population of about 1500.

On that page we remembered past in a small, Alabama town a little wistfully.  Remember the proms at high school?  And the year PCHS won the biggest school spirit contest in the state, sponsored by the most popular radio station in Birmingham, WSGN?  We won a dance for the high school with The Gentrys (rock stars at the time) performing.  What a triumph! (And we won a jukebox.  Some of us would like to know where that jukebox went.)

At high school dances, couples actually danced together.  Not like they’d done at the sock hops in the Avondale Junior High gym, where the girls and the boys rarely stirred from their separate sides of the basketball court.  Sock Hops.  That’s where it led to next: a wish to bring back old times for just one night—to do a sock hop, just once, the way it ought to be done.

A few people began to discuss it.  And the more it was discussed, the more it seemed possible that it might be accomplished.  A few began to plan and meet and prepare.  An organization was formed, mostly from members of the PCHS Class of 1967.  They did what they had done as teenagers, collecting signatures and bottle caps for a radio station contest.  They made it happen.

They needed a venue big enough to include everybody who wanted to be there.  To get the word out, they needed advertising, addresses, mailers.  They needed to fund the event, so there had to be ticket sales, door prizes, donations.  And they had to have food and soft drinks.  And mostly, they had to have music.

Music.  Thinking big, a former Barons band member had the impossible idea of  bringing the Holladay/Riser trio home to sing.  They’d have come from Washington State and Mississippi and of course, Pell City, just to sing for old friends.  The Baron’s Band from our rec hall days had drifted apart during those 45 years, but with some original members and some new, it was rebuilt into a new band to play for us.  Classmates came from distant places too.  Because it was an opportunity not likely to happen again in our lifetimes—to see our oldest friends from any and all classes of Pell City High School.

In spite of a driving rainstorm, more than 500 PCHS graduates, family and friends gathered at Celebrations on February 18, 2012.  Friends we hadn’t seen since childhood and friends from down the street met and visited with each other for a few priceless hours.  Current PCHS Cheerleaders performed and inspired the crowd of all ages to get up and dance.  Pell City’s re-formed (but not reformed) band from the sixties played.  And Pell City’s only Alabama Music Hall of Fame members, Ginger and Mary Holladay, with their longtime friend and trio member, Nell Riser, sang old favorites beautifully, just as if they were still the teenagers they’d been when they started.  The laughter and dancing passed till well past our old curfew of 11 p.m.  And the traffic lights never blinked caution.

A few people went a long way with the hopeful notion and some re-energized spirit and made it happen.  But they didn’t want to say that it would never happen again, so early on in the planning they changed the name from “The Last Sock Hop” to “The Next to the Last Sock Hop,” keeping that hope alive that we’d meet again, always one more time to re-live a little of our long-lost youth.  A new Facebook page was initiated by somebody who made a serious typographical error in the title.  “The Pell City Next to the Last Sock Hop Committee” Facebook page is still out there.  It, like “You Know You’re From Pell City” is an open forum.  Anyone can join and bring his or her ideas to the fray.  There are 150 members of The Sock Hop Committee today.  If you missed it, you missed a great time.  Here’s to the hope we can do it again, someday.  Maybe next February??

From the proceeds of the event, $500 went to the Pell City High School cheerleaders, $500 went to the PCHS art department, and a $100 prize was awarded for Best Dressed.

This article was contributed by the following members of the Pell City Sock Hop Committees:

Joe Funderburg