WELCOMING MAY

More than 1500 people turned out on May 1, 1955 to watch 300 gaily dressed youngsters dance around the Maypole in the Bangor Auditorium. The gala festival was sponsored by the Y-Squares, an adult dancing group from the YMCA. Margaret Bennett instructed the young dancers in the varied and entertaining program.

THOUSANDS OF MAINERS USED TO COME TO BANGOR TO ATTEND ANNUAL MAYPOLE FESTIVAL

BY ROSEMARY LAUSIER

For almost three decades, a 20-foot pole would be set up right in the center of the basketball court in the former Bangor Auditorium.

Ribbons would be attached to the top and two dozen youngsters would dance around the wooden pole, wrapping it in a multitude of colors.

But the kids weren’t just randomly dancing around or playing some sort of playground game. They were performing a traditional folk dance as part of Bangor’s annual Maypole Festival.

A maypole dance centers around a chopped down pole — usually from a cedar or birch tree — that is erected and decorated with flowers, greenery and ribbons. Each participating dancer holds a ribbon, intricately weaving around the pole, and then reverse their steps to unwind it.

Oftentimes a maypole dance or festival is meant to simply celebrate the start of springtime, although in some cultures, the dance is tied to pagan fertility rites. Typically, it is performed on May 1 — also known as May Day — but in some countries such as Sweden, the maypole is part of ‘Midsommar’ which marks the beginning of the summer solstice in June, according to the New York Times.

It may be hard to imagine such an event happening in the center of the Cross Insurance Center now, but thousands of people would attend the highly anticipated festival put on by local dance teacher Peg Bennett to support a beloved YMCA summer camp.

Hailing from New Hampshire, Bennett taught dance to kids from grade school age up through high school, generally in after school programs. She mostly traveled to her students, teaching classes in schools in the Bangor area, churches, VFWs, grange halls and at the former YWCA before moving

Y-Squarettes getting ready for the annual Maypole Festival in 1956.

operations to the YMCA 15 years later as the number of students she taught grew.

Reaching up to almost 1,000 students at the height of her career, she taught a variety of dances — such as square dancing, cha cha, bossa nova, Viennese waltz and polka.

“Dancing was a huge part of my growing up years. I loved to dance,” Bennett’s former student Joellyn Alexander said.

Her students danced everywhere from jamborees at the Brewer Auditorium to parades, local nursing homes and hospitals. Some larger events that her older students performed at included the U.S. bicentennial celebration at the Senate Office Building in Washington D.C. and at Tomorrowland in Disney World in 1981.

But the big event for Bennett and her students was the annual Maypole Festival.

The first maypole event, then called the Maypole square dance, was held in 1953 — a year after Bennett started teaching — at the YMCA and featured 18 of her students in the traditional maypole dance. By 1955, however, the festival was held at the Bangor Auditorium and featured hundreds of her students and was attended by more than 1,500 people, according to Bangor Daily News archives.

“The Maypole Festival would fill the Bangor Auditorium with proud parents. It was almost like Little League, everyone was in it — it was pretty spectacular,” her son, Tom Bennett, told the BDN in 2013.

Presented by the Maypole Festival Committee and held the first Saturday in May, each festival had a theme and would include various dances by each age group. But the featured dance, “The Winding of the Maypole,” was performed by two dozen 5th and 6th graders.

All the costumes were made by mothers with fabric Bennett bought, and the students played a heavy hand in organizing the festival as well.

“Maypole Festivals were 100 percent self-produced. The dancers themselves [especially the older ones] were tasked with making all the decorations and took care of other logistics,” Christopher Shirley, who danced for Bennett for eight years, said.

Bennett’s husband Bill Bennett was the youth director at the YMCA and proceeds from festival ticket sales would benefit Camp Jordan on Branch Lake in Ellsworth, where she worked as the camp dietician and “den mother” for 29 years, according to BDN archives. During the festival, whoever sold the most tickets would be crowned the Maypole King and Queen.

“I thoroughly enjoyed all the times I did it as a young person in that organization. It’s really too bad that we don’t have more of that kind of thing today,” Aprille Douglass, a former May Queen, said.

The Maypole Festival continued into the 1980s. After Bennett died in 1982, Shirley and another student Cathy Patterson took over and continued it as the May Day Festival until the last event in 1984, according to archives.

“I doubt anything else ever existed quite like it,” Shirley said.

Although audiences saw the dance skills taught by Bennett, she taught students more than just the waltz or square dance.

“Her goal was, I believe, was to teach etiquette and manners and behavior and self control. And she did it through dance,” Tom Bennett said recently. “She did very well at it.”