I Collect Honky Tonks ...
		The Sundowners performed here in the early 1990's.  Bob Boyd, Curt Delaney, and Don Walls brought a 25,000 song repertoire to Franklin Park, Illinois.  If you wanted to dance to the music of Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb,  the Sons of the Pioneers, or any of the Hanks, this was the place.  On Monday evenings, I taught the two-step, the western swing, and other country dances here.  Other nights, I just came here to dance and listen.  I heard their friend, Patsy Montana, sing here one night.  Before the Sundowners leased it,  the building was home to a country bar called Kickers.   I heard Kitty Wells sing there one night.  Now the building houses a sports bar.  Because we needed more of those.
Country Music Inn.  At the corner of Aptakisic Road and Milwaukee Avenue in Prairie View, Illinois.  This was the place to be in the 1980's and many of us were thought to get our mail delivered here.  The Western Echoes, always four or five pieces, was the house band here.  Gary Brock on bass, Kenny Champion on pedal steel, Bobby Greenwood on drums, John Rice on lead or fiddle, Tani on rhythm. The dance floor had an odd shape, but you could dance any line dance you liked on it, as long as it was the Four Corners.  If it rained, the parking lot was under water.  Also if it didn't rain.  This building has since been razed and there is a subdivision on the site now, with its own shopping mall even.  Because we needed more of those.

		This was already the second or third site in the Loop that the Sundowners had occupied since the early 1950's.  Each time they moved it was because their building was being torn down.  But there they were, the consummate country band, drawing thousands of visitors passing through downtown Chicago each year.  When life was at its best, Saturday nights began at Country Music Inn or at Sundance, near Mundelein.  Then an hour's drive to the city and we'd be on the Double R's dance floor, such as it was, until just before sunrise.   In the late 1980's the Sundowners left the Loop for good when their building was demolished to make way for a bigger, better skyscraper.  Because we needed more of those.

... these places had character.  I remember them and I remember the friends I made there. 

Quiz:   Country round dances are traveling dances and require ample dance floors.  Dimensions usually range from 25'x15' on up to 100'x50', even bigger in Texas.  Large or small, this is not money making square footage;  one doesn't sell food or drink on it.  A famous patron of country dance regretted the relocation of his favorite country dance halls from the cities to the outskirts, even as he acknowledged that their survival depended on having cheap floor space available.  Who was this man, so passionate about the subject that he commissioned a country dance book to be ghostwritten and published under his own name?     

Hint:  He lived in Dearborn, Michigan

Answer