Co-founder looks back on six decades of Bethettes
Picture “Happy Days,” only in suburban Pittsburgh instead of Milwaukee, with girls named Donna and Barbara instead of guys called Potsie and Fonzie. Now, picture them in their mid-’50s family basements.
“We’d go to each other’s houses, and we’d twirl,” Donna recalled about their prized-possession majorette batons. “I have a younger sister, and we’d make her march around with us. We invented stuff.
“I mean,” she’ll contend, “it was really weird.”
Well, not really, if you listen to Donna Cartwright Soulakis tell the tale about how she and classmate Barbara Kamerer Allan started what has become a Bethel Park High School institution: the perennially award-winning Bethettes.
Donna plans to travel from her home in Plano, Texas, to attend the Oct. 7 Bethel Park Band Festival, during which the Bethettes will be honored for six decades of stellar performances.
For the sake of her story, let’s travel back to the summer of 1955, when two teenagers – Donna from Charleroi, Barbara from Grand Rapids, Mich. – arrived in town, made friends and anticipated the start of their junior year at Bethel (no “Park” yet) High School.
“It was a time that people sort of make fun of, that it was a simple, innocent time,” Donna said with the glowing fondness of nostalgia, observing how her new home differed from her previous one. “It was the country. There was really no downtown. That’s what shocked me. There was no center. If you wanted to do anything, you hopped on the trolley and you’d go to Pittsburgh.”
She and Barbara also were surprised to discover that, as aspiring majorettes, there was no room for them among the very few slots for girls who were permitted to perform with the high school marching band.
Donna had discovered, though, that they didn’t necessarily need one.
While attending the Allegheny County Fair – “I could walk from where I lived over to the fairgrounds” – she took in performances by drill teams that had just a percussionist or two for accompaniment.
“We could just march around,” she told Barbara. “We don’t have to be part of a band.”
That’s when they started practicing at one another’s homes, with an eye toward doing something with their developing skills. They didn’t know what until they saw a flier for an upcoming event called Telerama.
“Of course, if you’re not from Bethel, you would not be familiar with this,” Donna explained. “But it is a talent show that they put on every February.”
She and Barbara rounded up about a dozen other classmates to give it a go.
“The theme of the thing was ‘café in Paris’ or something,” Donna recalled. “We were supposed be waitresses, and so we came up with these little red-and-white checkered costumes. And we did it.”
And it worked.
“Oh, my gosh, people really liked us! All these years later, and I remember how fun it was.”
The next step was to keep it going for the next event, which may or may not have occurred shortly after.
“This is where it all gets foggy for me,” Donna admits. “I thought that we participated in the 1956 St. Patrick’s Day parade in Pittsburgh. I’ve had this discussion with my husband, and he said, ‘Well, let’s see if the Pittsburgh Press has archives and see if we can find if there’s anything about a St. Patrick’s Day parade.'”
Mike Soulakis found what he was looking for, and his wife told of his reaction, lowering her voice an octave.
“Hey, Donna! The 1956 St. Patrick’s Day parade was snowed out. They canceled it.”
They couldn’t find any information whatsoever about the ’57 version, and fellow Bethettes of the time aren’t too sure about the dates, either. So that’s a minor mystery for, say, Ellery Queen to solve.
Speaking of the Bethettes, they didn’t really have a name until a bit later, although details on that are kind of hazy, too.
“I’ll tell you, we truly did all get together,” Donna said. “We sat in a classroom. We decided we needed a name, and that’s when we put five goofy names up on the blackboard.”
A couple of them were “Hawkettes” and “Blackhawkers,” both of which were summarily dismissed because of their resemblance to slang involving, shall we say, expectoration.
“So then we voted, and Bethettes was still up on the board. So Bethettes we became.”
Next came the uniform, which was to integrate the school colors.
“Everybody wanted orange,” Donna reported. “They wanted to march in orange. And my friend Barbara, she hated orange. She said, ‘I look terrible in orange. I will not put on orange.'”
The compromise was to line black skirts with orange, complemented by black sweaters with “Peter Pan” collars and white boots with pompons.
“And lo and behold, the Bethettes were born.”
And the uniforms, believe it or not, have not changed since.
Donna and Barbara graduated as part of Bethel High School’s Class of ’57, and original members Joan Loudon Perkins and Gladys Bloch Brown took over leadership the following year.
“On their watch, they got to be part of the band, to march around with the band at all the games and everything,” Donna said, crediting them with moving the group forward significantly. “From there, it’s just gone crazy.”
In fact, Donna didn’t think much about what she started until about a decade after the fact, when she was invited to attend a Bethettes tryout.
“I went up there, and I was so shocked. There were hundreds of young ladies marching around,” she recalled. “I told them, ‘We were begging people to come join this group.’
“And now, it’s such a thing, Everyone wants to be a Bethette. That part makes me really happy, that it’s something that lasted.”