Category: History || By

Paul Roth left McKeesport to become a noted pioneer in the field of computer simulation and computer models, and twice was elected to head the national organization of researchers interested in the field.

A graduate of both Pitt and the University of Pennsylvania, he retired from the computer science faculty at Virginia Tech after teaching at Villanova, Maryland and South Florida universities, and his long career also included work with the National Bureau of Standards, Burroughs Corp. and General Electric.

But his passion --- formed during his teen-age years in the Library District of the city --- is the dance band music of the 1940s and '50s. Roth's avocation has been interviewing jazz musicians of the "big band" era and cataloging their recordings. Roth recounted those formative years last year in an article for Western Pennsylvania History magazine.

Roth, a McKeesport High School graduate who now divides his time between Western Pennsylvania and Florida, will be speaking at 2 p.m. Saturday (Oct. 18) at the McKeesport Regional History & Heritage Center in Renziehausen Park to deliver its annual Founders' Day Address. The event is free and open to the public; call (412) 678-1832 or visit the website.

Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing for nearly 20 years, Roth traveled the country, interviewing important contributors ranging from Sammy Kaye to Steve Allen. Many of the recordings that Roth collected during his travels now form the Paul F. Roth Collection of the American Dance Band at Stanford University in California, and that archive has been used by music historians throughout the world.

The classic dance band era began in the late 1920s and died off after World War II, but during its heyday, orchestras of a dozen musicians or more regularly toured the country to play live music nightly in front of crowds in hotel ballrooms and dance halls. McKeesport's Penn-McKee Hotel and Palisades ballroom were important stops for many national and regional bands, as was the former Vogue Terrace nightclub in North Versailles Twp. and Bill Green's club in Pleasant Hills, now the site of Bill Green's Shopping Center.

Big name bands didn't play the Penn-McKee, Roth says, but they did play the Palisades. "Yearly, Russ Morgan would come to (McKeesport)," he says, while Green's "was a premier stop" for the national bands. ("A teen-ager rarely had the cash to go out there," he says, adding that the Vogue was a place to take "a heavy date.")

Those bands also regularly performed at theaters in downtown Pittsburgh such as the Stanley-Warner (now the Benedum Center) and Loew's Penn (now Heinz Hall). "I practically lived at the Stanley Theater on weekends," Roth says.

In the pre-television era, dance band orchestras also provided much of the programming for both local and network radio broadcasts, and Bill Green's regularly hosted national radio broadcasts.

The expense of keeping those large bands on the road helped lead to the end of the "big bands" in the early 1950s, with only a few well-known groups --- such as the bands led by Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo --- still remaining.

"Part of the decline of the dance bands was that it was too expensive to have an eight or 10 or 12 piece band to cart around the country," Roth says. "A four-piece combo --- three guitars and a bass --- was cheap."