At The Hop!

BILLBOARD Magazine, April 20. 1957 ..."Little Georgie" Hack, WBOC, Salisbury, Md., is now emceeing three weekly record hops and is anxious to line up record artists as guests.

George also hosted a weekly teen dance program on Saturday afternoons televised live from the WBOC-TV studio. When Dick Clark made a benefit appearance in Salisbury he and George were in the spotlight together at a teen dance held in the Armory. As George recalls it Clark came to Salisbury to raise funds for the tennis courts at Wicomico Middle School at the request of Clark's wife whose aunt was a principal or vice principal at the school.

In the late 1940's the parents of Dick Clark's girlfriend, Babrara Mallery, moved to Salisbury from Syracuse, NY. She attended Salisbury State College for a couple of years before transferring to another college. Clark was working at WFIL in Philadelphia at the time and made frequent trips to Salisbury to visit Barbara. As referenced in the book "American Bandstand"...which necessitated what Clark described as seventeen-hour "sheer suicide" motor trips in his heaterless '34 Ford convertible in the dead of winter. They married in 1952; divorced in 1961.

The Pier Ball Room in Ocean City was the location for many teen record hops. In the late 1950's Baltimore's popular disc jockey Buddy Dean held hops there every Friday and Saturday night. The town of Ocean City leased the Pier building for teen dancing nightly except Sunday during the summer. Dean hosted a teen dance program on Baltimore TV for six years. In the early 1960's WJDY's Johnny Williams was doing seven hops a week at the Pier. In the areas around Pocomoke City it wasn't a record hop but a "Chop Hop" that teens looked forward to, hosted by WDVM'S (later WDMV) Choppy Layton.

Contributed by Terry Kleger of Salisbury. terrykleger@yahoo.com