The Origins of PittStop Lindy Hop 2001

by Barry Adams with lots of input by Lisa Matt and John Maletta.

So how did PittStop Lindy Hop start back in 2001? First some brief history of Lindy Hop in Pittsburgh. Coal Country Traditions (CCT), which is a non-profit dance organization formed in 1982 was running Swing dances two or three times a month in Pittsburgh as the revival of Lindy Hop started to spread across the country. Within Pittsburgh there were a number of dancers who learned Lindy Hop from other areas of the country. Lisa Tamres, Lynn Baumeister and others had been teaching Swing for many years. Lisa and Lynn knew Lindy Hop but decided to bring in some instructors, Carol Kopp and Karl Knopp, from Cleveland to teach Lindy Hop in 1998. A bunch of dancers from Pittsburgh, including me, took that class. After this class, Lisa and Lynn were comfortable teaching Lindy Hop themselves and the number of Pittsburgh dancers learning Lindy Hop started to spread in earnest.

Flash forward a few years to 2001, Shawn Coyle and Lisa Matt (Janosko at the time) went to the Toronto Lindy Exchange and had a blast. They were excited and wanted to do something similar in Pittsburgh. They started planning in the car on the drive home and dreamed about the possibilities. Once home, Lisa asked Shawn how serious he was about really planning something like this. Lisa told him that she was on board if he was serious.  They wanted to bring all the swing groups around Pittsburgh together to make it work. They were even willing to put up the money themselves hoping that they would be able to recover some or all of it. But honestly, they did not know what to expect.

There were really only two groups, CCT and other young dancers who had learned Lindy Hop elsewhere. It did not take much convincing to bring in CCT. Lisa Tamres thought it was a great idea and CCT had an ongoing organization and more importantly the money to also back the event. The other groups were just individuals who had Lindy Hop friends in Pittsburgh and more importantly outside of Pgh. These included Ben Rich, Caitlin Reynolds and Jake Sprouse. They were all young and just starting their adult lives. These dancers also traveled a lot to dances elsewhere. There was some concern initially that Pittsburgh could not pull off an event like this with such a small Lindy Hop Community but once the committee got started everyone was on board and worked hard to make it happen. I joined the committee since I was the accountant for CCT and would continue in that role for the newly formed committee.

The Core Committee:
Chair: Lisa Matt (Janosko)
Finance: Barry Adams
Shawn Coyle
Caitlin Reynolds
Ben Rich
Lisa Tamres
Sub Committee
Housing: Amy Masnick
Volunteer Coordinator: Malinda Lovic
Website: John Maletta

Of course, we had to come up with a name. I vaguely remembered sitting around at one of our meetings throwing out names. Finally, someone said; “PittStop Lindy Hop” and everyone knew that should be the name. It even rhymes which is cool! I sort of remember that it was Caitlin who came up with the name, but Lisa Matt said it was Ben who came up with the final version. Nonetheless it was a great name which we still have to this day!

Everyone on the committee worked hard. Lisa Matt did a lot with the venues. Lisa got the IBEW Union Ballroom which is now called the Circuit Center which we are going back to this year, for our 25^th Anniversary. Back then it was a new venue looking for people to rent so we got a good deal on it. We later had to go elsewhere as it got more popular and too expensive. We also got the Associate Artist Room downtown, which is not there anymore, the Irish Center (now closed) for late-nights and Wightman Community Center. Note, Lisa Matt was our Chair for many of the years she was on the committee and still lives in the Pittsburgh area and comes to all our PittStops.

The bands were, first and foremost, Paul Cosentino’s Boilermakers Jazz Band with Jenny Luv for Sat evening, which has not missed a PittStop, Benny Benack Jr. Combo for Friday night who comes from a long line of Pittsburgh musicians and Corner Pocket (from Toronto who for some reason was in town) for one of our late nights. For the rest of the dances, we had DJs. Disco Gerdes and Jake Sprouse helped round them up.

John Maletta volunteered to do our website. You must remember this was in the early years of websites. John was currently in graduate school and hand-coded the website by himself. There was no Word Press back then. I believe our website had a lot to do with our attendance. John continued enhancing and managing our website for a very long time. Our website made us look like we knew what we were doing. Not to say we did not but we were all new to this.

All our registration was done by mail (old school) and Lisa Matt and her mother handled all of that. Lisa’s mother continued doing registration for a long time and still comes to PittStop. Everyone paid by check back then. The value of Ben, Caitlin and Jake was critical as they posted information to a bunch of swing discussion boards and different websites advertising our event. It really helped that they were well known in the Lindy Hop Community outside of Pittsburgh.

Financially we ran this event on a shoestring. Our venues did not cost a lot, CCT, which has sound equipment, ran the sound for free and our bands were reasonably priced. Lisa Matt, Shawn and CCT made advances to get the event started and all the committee members paid for their registration. We had well over 100 dancers registered for the entire weekend and our walk-up was great. All the committee members got paid back their registration fees and we made some money in the first year.

Some other important items. We had a lot of out-of-town dancers (including Gordon Webster as a dancer) come to Pittsburgh who continued to come back to this day. That first year we had a lot of Canadians come down. We housed all the out-of-town dancers and established that Pittsburgh was a friendly city which is true to this day. Below is our original flyer we used to advertise our first event. CCT is still the sponsoring organization and myself, and Lisa Tamres have been on every committee. Yes, we are old, but our committee continues to have mostly younger members who were just babies when we started. About thirty percent of our dancers are still from colleges and Universities. Great Bands, venues and music are still the foundation of our event. We contend that we are one of the longest running Lindy Hop Dance Exchanges (maybe the longest) in the country. This year we will have our 25^th Anniversary and we have pulled out all the PittStops to bring you the best PittStop Lindy Hop ever!