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Show He and Mother sometimes moved most of the furniture out of the library-meeting room for a dance or a party. That room was, however, too small when all the families of the community frolicked together. After Grandfather died, Father contrived a larger place for dances. He bought a shack from a discouraged homesteader. Aided by two or three volunteers, he tore out one end of each of two structures, the one he'd bought from the departing settler and the house he'd built for Grandfather to occupy during the time he had lived at Nada after grandmother died. The carpenters under Father's supervision joined the two structures into one. Combined they made a room 12 feet wide and 32 long, with a cloakroom at one end. That sounds out of proportion. Actually we needed ample space at one end for two purposes; tables for the cakes each family brought for the midnight refreshments, and places to "bed down" the babes in arms and youngest children in little beds or pallets while their parents danced. Nada had no baby-sitters. Everybody attended, and everybody learned to dance after a fashion, even if he or she couldn't before coming to Nada. Everybody joined in the refreshments. When the ladies cut the cakes and poured the coffee, the drowsy kids revived, at least for a bottle of milk. The long room was serviceable for "square dancing" because two "sets" could dance in almost equal areas. We learned square dancing after we arrived on the desert, as a typically Western activity and a type that almost anybody could learn rapidly. But most of the time we one-stepped or fox-trotted. I went to school in this building a year or two when our pleadings persuaded Beaver County we could meet the rule: at least 12 children |