Ellington at
Old Orchard Beach
Pier Casino and Palace Ballrooms


supplement to
The Duke – Where and When
A Chronicle of Duke Ellington's Working Life and Travels

Until 1963, there were two dance halls in the city of Old Orchard Beach, a New England seaside resort at Saco Bay on the coast of Maine. This webpage documents the twenty known appearances here by Ellington and his orchestra from 1926 to 1961.

Saco Bay below the low water mark is within Saco city limits. (Biddeford-Saco Journal 1969-07-22 p.1). On land, the city of Saco lies to the south, west and northwest of Old Orchard Beach.

The Palace Ballroom at 45 West Grand Ave., demolished in 1963, was about ¹/₄ mile south of the Old Orchard Beach pier, and could accommodate about 1,000 dancers. Ellington appears to have performed here twice, in 1956 and 1961.

Duke and his orchestra played The Casino or Pier Casino about 18 times from 1926 to 1959.
This was a ballroom at the seaward end of a pier running out into Saco Bay from the beachfront of Old Orchard Beach.

The pier originally extended 1,825 feet into the bay, but after a 1909 storm destroyed 300 feet in the middle and part of the ocean end, it was rebuilt about 1,000 feet shorter (Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Me., 1909-04-06 p.4). Reasons given for shortening the pier were that no steamers docked at the pier and a shorter pier meant patrons wouldn't need to walk a quarter mile to reach the casino (Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Me., 1909-04-22 p.4).

Another storm during the 1909 rebuild swept away the boat used by construction workers to get to the casino, marooning them in a shaking building. The first rescue attempt ended when the rescue boat, a dory, capsized and the rescuer had to swim ashore. Another dory rescued the workers after two days (Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Me. 1909-05-03 p.1). There may have been storm damage in 1938 or 1939, but a superficial search of Maine newspapers in one on-line archive turned up only a brief mention of spray going over the pier during the 1938 hurricane.

In 1969, a fire at the shore end of the pier destroyed the access to the pier and several amusements on the pier and on the shore. Rather than reopening the undamaged ballroom, the owners demolished it in January and February, 1970. While most of the pier was in Old Orchard Beach, the end of the pier and the ballroom were in Saco since they were beyond the Saco Bay low water mark. This complicated matters since both cities had to approve the rebuilding of the pier and amusements and approve the ballroom demolition. The building was taken apart using a helicopter to ferry debris to a truck on the shore. From there it was to go to a landfill, but a city ordnance said the Old Orchard Beach landfill could not accept material from beyond city limits.

The 1926-08-10 and 1926-08-11 Biddeford Daily Journal ads refer to the venue as "Ocean Pier, OLD ORCHARD." Portland Evening Express ads on the same dates call it "Old Orchard Pier." (Biddeford and Portland are nearby cities). The caption to the photograph on page 74 of MIMM mistakenly leaves "Old" out of the town name. Vintage postcards advertised on eBay don't give specific names for the venue. One is captioned The New Pier, Old Orchard, Me., and shows buildings at the shore and ocean ends, with the pier deck open to the elements (this was likely prior to the disastrous 1909 storm). Another is an aerial photo showing a covered pier, the casino/dance room over the water and an amusement complex at the shore end, beside a roller coaster. Yet another appears to be a hand-drawn aerial view, showing a covered pier leading to a building with signage showing "...ION PICTURES," "CASINO" "VAUDEVILLE" and "DANCING" and a rooftop sign over the shore building saying "MOVIES" and "DANCING." Since the city name and the name of the pier ballroom vary in in the printed itineraries and in the local advertisements, for simplicity and consistency, this webpage simply calls the venue Old Orchard Beach Pier. Here are a few examples of postcard images of the Pier readily available on the internet;

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Steven Lasker:

• Opposite page 100 in Mercer's book is a photo of Ellington and Miley pointing to a poster advertising this engagement.
  
  
  
  1926-Ellington and Miley, Orchard Pier poster
  Click to Enlarge
  (Ellington is misidentified as Carney in this caption.)
  The poster reads as follows:
  COMING! COMING! COMING!
  OCEAN PIER OLD ORCHARD
  THUR. EVE'NG AUG 12
  THE PAUL WHITEMAN OF COLORED ORCHESTRAS
  DUKE
  ELLINGTON
  IN PERSON
  AND HIS FAMOUS
  ORCHESTRA
  DIRECT FROM THE PLANTATION, N.Y.
  FEATURED ON THE TRIANGLE BLUE
  DISC
  JEANETTE AND PERFECT RECORDS
  
  
  

  ---

  
  
• 
  Duke Ellington and His Plantation Orchestra
  Old Orchard Beach, 1926
  Click to Enlarge
  This photo of the Washingtonians (advertised in Biddeford Daily Journal as Duke Ellington and His Plantation Orchestra) taken in Old Orchard Beach must date to this day. Ken Steiner did a little googling on the name "MAGUIRE INC." which appears in the upper right corner. While he didn't do a deep dive, it appears there was an electrical firm in Orchard Beach by that name.
• The identities of the personnel depicted has occasioned considerable discussion:
  • The image was first reproduced, "courtesy Sonny Greer," in Music Is My Mistress (p.74). That reproduction was truncated on both its left and right sides.
  • The complete image appears here, courtesy of Fredi Washington's photo collection held by the Connecticut Historical Society. Click to enlarge it.
  • The three men in the upper right are unquestionably Guy, Hardwick and Ellington. The man at lower left is certainly Sonny Greer, while the two men on the lower right are Nanton and Miley. Which leaves the question: who are the two men on the left in the top row, and who is second from the left in the botton row?
  • According to the caption in MIMM, Edgar Sampson is second from the left in the botton row, but when, in the spring of 1991, I asked Stanley Dance (who assisted Ellington in preparing MIMM) if he agreed that's Sampson, he replied that he had known Sampson personally, and that the person in the photo must have been someone else.
  • In a Facebook discussion with Ken Steiner, Phillippe Milanta suggested that it might be Louis Metcalf. While any association of Metcalf and Ellington prior to 1926 11 29 isn't otherwise documented, the resemblance of the unidentified man in the bottom row to a later photo of Metcalf, reproduced on the cover of Record Research 46 (October 1962), is striking.
  • The man in the upper left in the photo, identified in MIMM as Rudy Jackson (who didn't join the band until 1927 06 00), may well be Max ("Mack") Shaw. I was the first to suggest that it might be. David Palmquist, in a 2022 10 29 email, disagreed: My ability to recognize people in photos has always been limited but I don't think that's Shaw in the photo. While this guy has a prominent lower jaw, the hairline and nose look wrong compared to the 2 images in our supplementary Max (Mack) Shaw webpage. Ken Steiner, in a 2022 12 28 email, observed that the "wave in his hair and his hairline look like they belong to the same person" when compared to the 1925 photo of Shaw reproduced in the Shaw webpage. I agree.
  • The man in the top row, second from the left, identified as Percy Glascoe in MIMM is still unidentified. I haven't encountered any photographs of Glascoe alone, but the man identified in MIMM as Glascoe bears a resemblance to the third man from the right in the bottom row of this photo of Glascoe's orchestra.
  • If these attributions are correct, the nine Washingtonians were comprised of three brass (Miley, Metcalf and Nanton), two reeds (Hardwick and Glascoe) and four rhythm (Ellington, Guy, Shaw and Greer).
• (also see comments at 1926 06 00 in TDWAW1

Old Orchard Beach and surrounding communities