Let's Dance

Gerry Dunn "erected the most ambitious dance pavilion ever built in Ontario cottage country," says author Peter Young. After Dunn's opened its doors in the summer of '42 it attracted dancers from far and wide, "dressed in their finest attire to dance in an atmosphere that was first-class all the way."

There were ups and downs, in the business as well as on the spacious dance floor. Musically, Dunn's shifted with the times, from the Ink Spots to Chubby Checker and beyond. Young traces it all, including how the business changed hands to become The Kee to Bala, as new generations of musicians and dancers turned up the volume and moved from Big Bands to Rock Bands.

Young's original 1997 book about this legendary Bala attraction, The Kee to Bala is Dunn's Pavilion, is now out of print. But its rich story became a chapter in his more comprehensive, 232-page Let's Dance, published in 2002, to cover all Ontario's dance halls and summer dance pavilions.

In Peter Young's larger portrait of those times and places across our province, when sensual saxophones played into the soft starlit nights, the magical power of summer dances at Dunn's was at the top of the league, because it included romantic Muskoka.

— Review by J. Patrick Boyer

ISBN: 978-1-896219-02-8
Dundurn, 2002
232 pages 8 x 10 in
$26.95 CDN/USA paperback