09/04/2026
SUPERIOR STORIES: Memories shared during our oral history project 💛
My freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, I joined a dance band named The Shadows. We were a six-piece group that played mainly at high school proms in northern Wisconsin. The following year, we changed our name to The Yellow Jackets, and I remained the pianist of the band through my sophomore, junior, and senior years. By my senior year, I had become the leader of the seven-piece Yellow Jackets. We performed all over northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota, even traveling as far as Ontonagon, Michigan, playing every Friday and Saturday night. We had a standing arrangement with Don Dahl, a radio announcer at KDAL in Duluth, where we would alternate 20 minutes of live music and 20 minutes of recorded music throughout the night. We were paid union scale for the four-hour gigs, which always had us returning to Superior in the early morning hours. On those early mornings, we'd stop at the Saratoga Cafe for meatballs and spaghetti before heading back to Sundquist Hall. We'd usually not sleep at all on Saturday, then sleep in late on Sundays to recover before classes on Monday. It was a whirlwind lifestyle, but I loved being a 'night person' and playing with the dance band. During my junior and senior years, we also had a 17-piece dance band that played big band arrangements at the Armory in Duluth once a month. These events included a dance contest judged by teachers from the Arthur Murray Studios in Minneapolis and a half hour radio broadcast over KDAL, Duluth. It was an incredible experience, and we were even offered an opportunity to play at the Prom Ballroom in Minneapolis after graduation, but almost all of the guys in the band had other plans. When I left Superior in 1957 to pursue my master's degree at Northwestern, I really missed those Friday and Saturday night gigs with The Yellow Jackets. The camaraderie and constant involvement with music was always a big part of my life at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. -Ronald Albert, Class of 1957
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