Month: December 2006

This is how Pete Douglas explained it to me in 1979–

“There was another spontaneous party going on. We were playing jazz and some of the people who visited were engineers from some of the electronic outfits down the Peninsula. And they got hold of this dynamite–and so like the boys they were, they have to try it out. I didn’t pay much attention to their interest in the dynamite. I was partying and dancing. So they disappeared on the beach. Fortunately they didn’t do it right in front of the house.

“And like I often do, after running the record player a little energetically, I wanted something a little laid back. I had classical records. I put on the Bach Brandenburg Concerto as a kind of relief from this jazz. We were feeling happy and continued to dance to Bach. Nothing is more powerful than Bach. Bach is very dramatic. When I heard the dynamite go off it sounded slightly muffled. But it reverberated very big down in Half Moon Bay–but the sheriff never go on to it….

“Bob Swift, the local science teacher, coined the phrase, Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society.”