Page 24 - Flathead Beacon // 7.23.14

24 | JULY 23, 2014 FLATHEADBEACON.COM
FUNKY TOWN THE PALM & THE DISCO DAZE OF WHITEFISH
parting on Sunday evening.
“The whole disco thing was brand new and
it was all the rage and this guy Fraser Baalim built the only one in Whitefish, so we were deal- ing with a lot of people from a long way away who were coming here just for The Palm,” Her- man said. “That was the draw, and people would come to town for these huge pub crawls. We’d have five or six busloads of them. It was just insane. They’d fill every bed in Whitefish and when Whitefish was full they’d fill Kalispell and Columbia Falls, too. We’d have four buses sitting in Whitefish and at 2 a.m. they’d stagger to their buses and go home. They skied, too, of course, but The Palm was certainly a huge draw in the downtown area.”
Do A Little Dance
Gary Cabell arrived in town shortly after The Palm opened and immediately began look- ing for a job. He’d worked briefly as a disc jockey for his college radio station, and The Palm was looking to hire someone after management had to fire its inaugural DJ.
“At one time someone did get busted for selling some Thai stick, I believe it was, out of the disco,” recalls John Macy, who worked as a bouncer at The Palm before becoming a DJ himself.
“I took Disco Doug’s place as a DJ,” Cabell said. “We started doing theme nights, like La- dies Night and Astrology Night. I think we started with Capricorn. I remember counting 125 women who came through the door on a La- dies Night. When it was going hot, it was really hot.”
The female bartenders and cocktail wait- resses wore tight-fitting halter tops. Bras were discouraged, while exposed midriff and make- up were mandatory.
“We had to wear these ridiculous tops and carry the drinks on a cocktail tray, and they were always spilling down our tops because
it was so packed,” Jan Metzmaker, one of The Palm’s first cocktail waitresses, said.
The DJ booth was filled with 2,000 record albums and two eight-foot tall speakers, and a marquee and reader board on the front of the building featured the classic, art deco font of the disco era.
“It was the nicest discotheque I’d ever been in,” Macy said. “It was state of the art. There was a sauna upstairs, and the hotel had sleep- ing rooms with bunk beds and dormitory-style bathrooms. But they were nice.”
The Palm’s signature cocktail was called the “Tropical Buzz” – a vodka concoction that tasted like a pina colada on steroids, served in a hurricane-shaped glass.
“It was one of these nightmarish drinks that has five types of liquor and a bunch of sugar and if you had five of those you were on your knees,” Macy said.
Packing the dance floor was effortless, Macy said, and while disco music figured prominent- ly into the DJ’s repertoire, rock music and slow dances were also common.
“We played a lot of disco, but not exclusively disco,” Macy said. “Disco gets derided now, but it was just like any genre of music – some of it is
“The Palm ignited this town. It created the Whitefish that you see today. We were way ahead of our time.”
Linda Roberts, manager at The Palm
Pat Pieroni performs his set at The Palm Discotheque. COURTESY OF PAT PIERONI
The Palm was also a 22-room hotel featuring a California Redwood sauna and a European bidet as well as live poker. COURTESY OF PAT PIERONI
really, really good. Of course, some of it is really bad. Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, the Bee- Gees, some of that stuff was really good. Some of it kind of stunk. But it didn’t matter. The dance floor was always packed. It was loaded. You could hardly get them to leave at 2 o’clock in the morning.”
In keeping with the spirit of the era, cocaine and hallucinogens were standard fare. So was promiscuous sex, and one evening a man dis- robed in The Palm’s all-glass lobby, nothing but a potted frond concealing his nether-parts from passersby. It also wasn’t uncommon to begin an evening at The Palace, dance at The Palm until the bar closed, then party all night before heading back to The Palace for the bar’s 8 a.m. happy hour, which catered to railroaders just finishing their shift.
“We’d all be at The Palace and then some- one would touch his palm and we’d just flood out the door and head to The Palm. That was the signal to everyone,” said Blankenship, whose signature dance move was known as the Blankenship Boogie.
“There were drugs there and the police al- ways kept a wary eye on us, but nobody there was lawless,” Macy said. “I remember we had quite a presence, probably just because it was so different.”
“It wasn’t out of control or anything, but it could be overwhelming at times,” Herman said. “They kept us on our toes.”
Disco Sucks
And then, one day, people stopped showing up. The mirror balls quit spinning and shim- mering, the dance floor quit luminescing and bellbottoms fell out of fashion.
“Boy, when it turned, it turned fast. It was like the faucet just turned off,” Pieroni said. “We maybe didn’t all love disco but we really loved what we created there. We were a family.”
Even after disco died – or, at least, changed