The old school DJ...

Marshall Flippo isn't a whole lot different from the DJ that spins music in clubs today. He was pretty much a forerunner to it. He spins his own records, now the music he uses is completely different, but he gets the crowd going and excited.

The reason Flippo was in town was for the 50th anniversary of the local square dance hall, one which he helped to build. Flippo was a really interesting guy to talk to, he learned to call square dancing in a chicken coup with all of his friends so they would have something to do on the weekends. They learned a few calls each so they could take turns dancing while one of the others called. After a while they outgrew their chicken coup and they ended up all building the Wagon wheel square dance hall.

After looking at the architecture of the hall there are a lot of interesting things you notice. Most of the beams for the roof are made from telephone posts because Flippo's wife at the time worked for the phone company and donated the poles to help in the construction. Also, the wagon wheel name comes from all the light fixtures being mad of old wagon wheels. Flippo told me that he and his wife spent what seemed to be endless weekends going to garage and yard sales looking for old wagon wheels to be used.

This was another one of those assignments I was too sure about going in. It was for a Sunday Life story which is always a 3-5 photo package and takes up the whole page front. Now, the only time I had ever square danced was in the 6th grade when it was forced upon is for a few weeks at a time in the winter, and I had no interest in it. So I thought it was going to be some corny guy up there sounding like those crappy records we had to suffer through. Well, it turns out Flippo is considered one of the best callers in the world, people were there from all over the state. People came from as far away as Amarillo and San Antonio just to dance with him calling. And when he got up the floor filled up so quick, it was a wonder how anyone had room to dance. It was pretty cool listening to him call, he sounded more like a rapper freestyling a country song with dance moves... pretty surreal.