Geri Myers and Lloyd Specht didn’t shy from the dance floor regardless how fast-paced the tune on Sunday afternoon.
They were among several seniors who participated in the Senior Citizens Prom, staged in the Iola High School gym.
“We both have two new knees and we’re trying to wear them out,” quipped Myers, a 77-year-old Iolan whose get-up-and-go hasn’t left her.
She and Specht, 86, of Piqua are found several nights a week on dance floors throughout eastern Kansas.
Both prefer music with a little jump to it and showed off some fancy steps Sunday afternoon.
“The slow music is for old people,” Myer said, with a twinkle in her eye.
The seniors’ dance was the second annual, put on by the IHS Leadership Class. The gymnasium still resembled the grand ballroom of The Titanic, left over from the previous night’s high school prom.
Louise Hedman, 79, Iola, and her sister-in-law, Leah Grennell, 84, of Humboldt were among those joining the fun.
When the curtain fell on Sunday afternoon’s gig, Grennell said she and a friend, Jewell Moore, were going to Longton for a similar Senior Citizens Prom. She never misses an opportunity to shake a leg.
Grennell reminisced about when she was a student at Humboldt High School and didn’t have a date for prom.
At the time, she was dating Lee Grennell, a student in Chanute. School rules forbade students from out of town to attend the Humboldt affair.
Instead of hitching up with someone else, Leah and some other girls without dates decided “we’d just go to the prom stag,” she said.
“That’s been many, many moons ago,” Grennell said. She recalled that a few years ago she found her old prom formal hanging in her mother’s garage on a farm near Humboldt.
“The dress originally was my cousin’s and my mother and grandmother redid it so I could wear it,” she said.
Asked whether she meant to dance at the Iola seniors’ prom, Grennell said that just depended — “on whether they have music (which they did) and whether anyone asks (which also occurred.”
Members of the leadership class made the afternoon special by furnishing flowers for all who attended and making themselves available to dance. The event had hardly started when Grennell and Wyatt Jensen, an Iola High student, were slow-dancing across the floor.
