Club Dance Floor

By Gary Salpini

In 1996, John Belt took the initiative to start working on developing a plan for our club to have a weekend party… a daunting task considering how young and under-funded our club was.  He contacted numerous hotels and consistently was rejected.  Most hotels want monetary guarantees and want to see the track record from your previous experiences.  We had neither the money nor the experience.  He was finally able to convince HoJo’s in Alexandria to take a shot on us.  Step one accomplished, we had a place.

John went on to the next problem.  Renting a dance floor.  The club had rented a small floor for a party at Cardinal Forest.  No problem, he would just rent a large floor.  That’s when he found out that no vendor had 1,200 sq. ft. of dance floor to rent.  This presented a problem.  Maybe we could use multiple vendors!  Then came the problem of the cost.  In order to get enough rental floor space from several vendors, the cost would be an outrageous $2,200 for rental alone, not including transportation or installation.  That was impossible.  Built into the cost, that would make the ticket price prohibitive.  Something else would have to happen.

About that time, the company that Gary Salpini was working for was removing a hardwood basketball court from a church in Oakton.  What if that could be salvaged and recycled?  Sounds interesting.  A refinished maple dance floor!  What a coup!

Gary had the carpenters saw the floor into panels that were slightly larger than 4 x 8 panels, and had 50 of them delivered to his house.  That Saturday, John Belt, Dave Rapson, and Gary Salpini went to work on re-sizing the panels to true 4 x 8 sheets to panelize the floor for portability. After 9 hours of extremely hard work, only about 6 panels were reasonably finished and the overall outcome looked really poor – the panels were just too heavy to deal with.  Seems that the basketball floor idea was a bust.  John, Dave, and Gary spent the next two days hauling all the floor panels back to the jobsite for disposal.  Something else would have to happen.

John spoke with someone at the Richmond club about their dance floor and they agreed to share their drawing plans with us.  A review of the plans showed a plywood floor system that appeared to be easy to build and economical to afford.  It was estimated that the floor could be built for an initial cost of about $1,300.  This would save a lot of money, even if it was only used once and then disposed of.  The plan was made.  We would build a dance floor.

John and Gary rounded up all the material and stored it at Gary’s house.  They set a date for the following Saturday to assemble and begin work.  The floor construction crew consisted of John Belt, Charlie Price, Gary Salpini, Dave Rapson, Valerie Swiger, Denise Bass, Les Lanier, and Jerry Crews.  A floor panel template was made, furring stringers were cut, and an assembly line set up.  By the end of the day, we had 44 dance floor panels ready for the inaugural Classic!  Some additional design and work continued to come up with a suitable edge piece to transition from the dance floor to the regular floor.

On the Thursday before the Classic, John arranged for a truck, and the floor was loaded, transported to the hotel, and set in place for the first time.  Five hours later the dance floor was complete and went on to become a focal point of the party.