Elderly residents locked out of dancing

MAYSVILLE, Okla. (AP) -- All Mammie Childress and her friends wanted to do was have some fun and get some exercise in their golden years.

But the Maysville Senior Citizens' Center stopped the music when officials increased a fee assessed to use the facility.

Childress and other Garvin County elderly residents are furious that center officials have changed building locks and assessed a $50 charge for what they have taken for granted during the 1990s.

"Our fun is dancing. We consider that our exercise," said Childress, 83, who has been dancing at the center for the past five years with her husband, Marvin Childress.

"Maysville has never wanted anyone to dance in the city. We'd sure like to get back in there so we can," Childress said.

The controversy began this summer when the Maysville Senior Center's board of directors decided to charge a $50 fee for activity use by outsiders. Officials changed the lock on the center's doors June 10.

At a September meeting of the center's board of directors, those on each side of the controversy "almost came to blows," Maysville Town Trustee Wilma McWhirter said.

State legislators have been asked to intervene, but to no avail.

"We treat everybody alike. The older dancers need to be paying just like anyone else," said Aline Robinson, chairwoman of the center's board. "We don't care if they want to dance. They just have to pay their part if they're dancing."

Others in this south-central Oklahoma community of about 1,200 disagree.

"This seniors' center was built and paid for by our taxpayers'

funds," said David C. Hogue, 74, who had attended the dances since 1991 with his wife, Louise, 71.

Hogue said that when the dances began, country-and-western bands played for free and there was no charge for using the seniors'

center.

As time went by, the couples who participated in the Saturday-night dance decided to pay each band member about $10 to $15 each week.

Every Saturday night until June, anyone wanting to dance paid $2.50 for admittance.

When the board began assessing a $50-per- session fee, Hogue said, the dancers couldn't afford to pay both the band and the fee.

Hogue said the Maysville seniors' center doesn't charge $50 for monthly domino tournaments and game nights held on week nights.

But Robinson said that center leaders consider those events necessary fund-raisers to pay for building rental.

Hogue said the center was built with funds from passage of the national Older Americans Act of 1965.

He also cites a 1991 letter from Perry G. Anderson, then-director of the Southern Oklahoma Development Association, which states that the seniors' center "should enhance social functions ... in the latter years of life" by providing "games, arts and crafts, and dancing."

Anderson, now deceased, noted that "negativism needs no place in a senior facility" and "no person or single group shall administer his or her idealism on the entire group."

Maud Duke, a center board member, said the board must raise $2,500 a year to pay for utilities, insurance, cleaning and landscaping.

"The only way to keep things going is by quilting, fund-raising and renting the facility," she said.

McWhirter sympathizes with the dancers.

"They harm no one. There's no drinking. And dancing is exercise," McWhirter said. "This whole thing is a real shame."