Show at The Venue recreates Purple Crackle music, atmosphere

By the time Jerry Ford and his band were into their second song of the night, they had pairs filling the dance floor.

A dozen or more drifted under the chandeliers at The Venue in Cape Girardeau while the singer sang about having this dance for the rest of her life.

Dancing and nostalgia were, after all, the point of the evening, organizer Jerry Ford said.

“Our goal tonight is to recreate what it would have been like for people to have an evening out at the Purple Crackle,” Ford said.

The Purple Crackle was, for decades, the swankiest, sultriest place to dine and dance in town. It actually was a bit outside of town, in East Cape Girardeau, Illinois, but it was the place to be.

Think Rat Pack atmosphere, but purple.

“It was a real classy place,” Ford said. “It was just something that, with people’s various musical tastes these days, has kind of gone by the wayside. But there are people who would still like to have that occasionally.”

So Ford made it happen, and who better? The trumpeter knew the Purple Crackle about as well as anyone around.

“I started playing there when I was a sophomore in high school in 1957,” he said, backing up bigger acts at first before eventually running his own band. He met his wife at the Purple Crackle during a blind date the last Sunday the Jack Staulcup Orchestra played there.

“Tuesday will be our 30th wedding anniversary,” he said.

But Ford is far from the only one for whom the Purple Crackle holds warm memories. Marilyn Rellergert and her husband, Ed, were regulars.

“We celebrated her 25th wedding anniversary there,” said her daughter Jill Braswell. “That was in 1978.”

“And my graduation from college,” said Rellergert’s other daughter, Sandy Glaser. She and Braswell brought Rellergert because the Purple Crackle still holds a special place in the minds for all three.

“It was just the nicest place to go,” Braswell said. “It’s where, my senior year of high school, we went after prom for a nice meal.”

Glaser still can recall the dim lighting, the purple curtains and the Chinese food you couldn’t get anywhere else because there were no Chinese restaurants yet in Cape Girardeau.

“You felt like you were in the city,” she said. “Or a speakeasy.”

The atmosphere, many of the guests agreed, isn’t something you can find on any old Sunday evening anymore.

In other places, Claudette Budde said, you waved your hand or snapped to flag a waiter, but not at the Purple Crackle.

“You used to turn the lamps around on your table if you needed service,” she said. “When you stepped into there, it was like stepping into a place that was not like the rest of your world.”

The Purple Crackle club changed formats by 1979, and the old-school atmosphere vanished. The site now is a strip club.

Her cousin, Mary Pensel, said that what she most misses about the Purple Crackle is the designated space for dancing. Not a place to groove or grind or to shimmy to the beat, but rather to dance with a capital “d.” Dances with steps, like the cha-cha or a waltz.

“I’m glad something’s being hosted in the area where you can dress up and dance,” she said.

Places such as the Purple Crackle come and go, but the dancing, she said, you can do wherever you have a partner.

“Swing, Latin music, it’s all in it,” she said. “If you know the steps, you can dance it anywhere.”

tgraef@semissourian.com

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