Rock Island Police Benevolent Association’s dance returns after two-year COVID hiatus | Local News

This year’s law enforcement dance and taco supper will be held from 5 to 11 p.m. April 23 at Culeman’s Memorial Hall at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Moline.

A taco meal can be purchased for $7 from 5 to 7 p.m. Otherwise the event is no cost and open up to the general public. There will be dancing and music from 7 to 11 p.m.

Silent auctions and raffles for these types of objects as reward baskets, overnight stays at neighborhood hotels, and even a offer from Rock Island Significant School to attend subsequent year’s sporting occasions, will be held to elevate funds for the associations numerous charitable routines.

In the previous, money from the dance went to fund the association’s Xmas food items basket system. Just about every yr the affiliation would make food baskets to go out to these in have to have in the group. The meals program nevertheless goes on, but now it is in conjunction with the Salvation Military, retired Rock Island Police Lt. Monthly bill Sowards said.

“The food stuff basket system bought so major we couldn’t cope with it by ourselves,” Sowards explained. “We needed a spouse.”

Monies elevated at the dance also go to assistance occasions these as Bob Vogelbaugh’s once-a-year Thanksgiving Day dinner, as very well as grants to the public and private universities in the metropolitan area, and to children’s sports and other functions for young ones.

“We hope anyone will arrive out and guidance a deserving cause,” Sowards claimed.

In year’s earlier, the dance was a substantial social occasion, he explained.

“We’d hold those dances at the Rock Island Armory,” Sowards reported. “It was a massive deal.”

In the times right before rock ‘n’ roll, bands participating in the music of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and other massive-band legends of the day would attract substantial crowds.

“There ended up a good deal of bands in all those days, and it did not price significantly to get just one to play the gig,” Sowards claimed.

In days gone by, such dances were acknowledged as a policeman’s ball, he added.

Digging around in the station in 2012, retired Rock Island Law enforcement Officer Mike Crow, who for many years acted as the department’s historian, found that the Rock Island policeman’s dance goes again to at least 1928.

Also for the duration of these several years, the police division and the Law enforcement Pension Fund experienced memento books or yearbooks in which marketing was bought.

Cash from the dances and the yearbooks would be utilized for a myriad matters, such as getting devices for the section that the city could not manage.

Generally, the funds elevated would be made use of to guidance widows and orphans, Crow claimed then.

“You have to don’t forget there ended up no social security nets at that time,” he said.

“Eventually, the bands gave way to DJs and their dance audio,” Crow claimed at the time. “But for many, numerous years, the dance was attended by just about all people in the metropolis. All the metropolis leaders and politicians had been there, way too.”