Callum DeVillier, a hairdresser from Lanesboro, Minnesota, designed his own headstone before his death in 1973. His head-turning epitaph contains his greatest accomplishment, engraved for posterity. “DeVillier,” the red granite marker reads. “World Champion Marathon Dancer. 3780 Continuous Hours.”

 In 1923, New York dance instructor and dance-a-thon patient-zero Alma Cummings exhausted an assortment of male partners as she waltzed around an Upper Manhattan ballroom for 27 hours straight. Her stunt was a tantalizing alchemy of the era’s fascinations, a test of the limits of both the human body and the nation’s new, liberalized sexuality. Within three weeks, her record was broken at least nine times across the country—from Baltimore to Cleveland to Houston. The age of the dance marathon jumped into full swing.

Enterprising promoters were quick to capitalize. If the industrial boom of the 1920s created a population of working urbanites hungry for entertainment, it also left rural Americans in increasingly dire circumstances, desperate and bored. For many, entertaining was a welcome diversion, especially if participating could mean a chance to save the farm.

Promoters took what started as a fun, voyeuristic, 1920s curiosity and turned it into a cottage industry for a country that was careening into hard times. They offered cash prizes that could be larger than a farmer’s yearly income, and formalized a system of live music (during peak hours, with phonograph records at other times), admission fees, and rules that kept marathons profitable for much longer than Cummings’s 27 hours. For a man like Callum DeVillier, fame and fortune were only remote possibilities, but attention was guaranteed. Dance marathons were a thrilling alternative to the doldrums of country life.

Contest pamphlets spelled out the rules of the individual marathons, but a few things became pretty standard. Dancers at least had to be in motion to remain in the contest. They were typically given 15 minutes of rest each hour, during which nurses rubbed their feet and provided medical attention. Food was provided many times daily, and tasks such as eating, bathing, shaving, and reading the paper could be done while dancing. Dancers could often be seen dozing off while their partners held them up to keep their knees from hitting the ground (which would result in disqualification). The scene was heavily regulated and monitored, with some promoters accompanying dancers on brief outdoor walks for a breath of fresh air before returning for more dancing. Promoters even planted professional dancers among the contestants. The windfall came from the spectators, returning night after night, cash in hand, to follow the action.

DeVillier had been making a name for himself in Minnesota’s dance marathon circuit even before the economic crisis spread nationwide. One 1928 marathon pamphlet noted that he “knocked the folks stiff at Brainerd (Minnesota) when he wobbled about the floor for 443 hours.” But desperate times called for more desperate dancing. Unemployed in 1932, DeVillier recruited his landlord’s daughter Vonnie Kuchinski to travel with him to the Boston suburb of Somerville for what turned out to be a historic event. (Boston proper could not host the contest, since the mayor had banned marathon dancing eight years earlier, after 27-year-old Homer Morehouse collapsed and died after an event.) In a theater-turned-dance-hall, DeVillier and Kuchinski performed a combination of glorified walking and intense bouts of spirited dancing every day, around the clock, from December until June. Rest time was cut from 15 minutes to three minutes per hour for the last two weeks of the contest. The unthinkably long marathon was a popular attraction, and late-night traffic from out-of-town spectators led local politicians to ban dance marathons—before the contest even ended. The final 52 hours of the marathon were danced nonstop. It’s not clear how long other competitors lasted, but on June 3, 1933, DeVillier and Kuchinski took home the $1,000 prize.

But by the mid-1930, dance marathons were already beginning to fall out of favor. Fewer and fewer people could spare the entrance fee. As the novelty wore off, the prosperity and relative liberalism of the 1920s had given way to the austerity and moralizing of the Depression. Dancing was considered a corrupting influence by some, and lawmakers across the country moved to ban the events. Promoters tried taming the contests by calling them “walkathons” (an appellation that endures today) and pursued wholesome sponsorships, but the practice was more or less gone as World War II approached. “[W]ith another World War looming … industry had revived and people were going back to work,” writes Martin. “Who had time to sit around for hours watching people move in a circle on a dance floor?”^[1]