Milford Museum spotlights town’s rock history

Milford used to be a rock ’n’ roll haven.

This summer, the Milford Museum, 121 S. Walnut St., in downtown Milford, opened an exhibit showing off the town’s musical heritage with albums, flyers, models and video from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“We had a lot of firsts here,” said Dennis Hazzard, a longtime broadcaster and Milford native who donated most of the exhibit from his personal collection. “Milford had the first dance hall for teens in the area; we had the first rock ’n’ roll band on the peninsula. It was a great time.”

The exhibit pays tribute to everything from Milford’s dance clubs to the local AM radio station, WKSB — where Hazzard acted as disc jockey on the town’s first rock ’n’ roll music block every day at 4 p.m.

“I snuck it in at first,” he said. “When school would be letting out, I would switch from country music, what I was supposed to play, to crossovers — the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley — people who were on both the rock ’n’ roll charts and the country charts.

“Eventually the owner got very disgruntled and asked me why I was doing this, and I had to convince him the kids wanted it. Eventually they gave me a half-hour as a compromise.”

Among the mementos are a few instruments donated by local musicians from the early rock era.

“We got Jim Schiff, from over in Harrington, to donate the saxophone he used back then, and a drum set Russell Argo used when he played in the Jems,” Milford Museum President Dave Kenton said. “We wanted to pull together as much as we could from that time.”

And there was a lot to pull together. It was a big era on the Kent/Sussex border, and at the center of it was a business Milfordians younger than 50 may have never even heard of. Its official name was the Milford Teen Club, but the regulars called it the Milford Canteen. It was on North Walnut Street, across the road from what is now the Milford Armory. Twice a week it hosted dances with a live rock ’n’ roll band, and calling it a hit would be selling it short.

“There was absolutely nothing like it,” Hazzard said. “You had dances at fire halls, but that was something you inherited from your parents. This was your domain.”

The exhibit includes pictures, bills and even film from the club, spliced in with a reel that includes footage from Milford High School dances and a performance from Billy Graves, a Georgetown native who was the only Delawarean to put a song on the Billboard Top 100 between 1955 and 1964.

Teens drove as far as 40 miles to dance at the canteen, Hazzard said, and it spawned imitators in Smyrna, Lincoln and Dover, among others.

“They recognized the popularity of what was going on in Milford, and they decided to open their centers up to kids, to come in and dance,” he said.

Milford’s house band was another one of its rock ’n’ roll firsts — the Country Cats, made up of Morty Marker, Jimmy Stayton and Honey Voshell. The museum’s exhibit includes a life-size tribute to the trio, with black-and-white cardboard standees of the band on stage.

“They have to be the first what you would call rock ’n’ roll band at least in
Kent and Sussex counties, if not the whole peninsula,” Hazzard said.
“Everybody else — everybody — played country western music.”

The man behind it all was John Mailor, a Milford businessman whom no one would have pegged for a rock fan.

“He was an elderly gentleman, a grandfatherly type, and I really don’t know what possessed him to do that,” Hazzard said.

Mailor was only able to keep the canteen open for a few years; after he tried and failed to set up a governing body to keep the hall running, he stopped holding concerts there, but kept it around as a dance hall that private parties could use for their own events.

“That club had a huge impact,” Hazzard said.

David LaRoss is a staff writer for the Milford Beacon, a sister paper to the Dover Post