Proms of yesterday, today looked upon fondly
An annual spring rite, the high school prom season gets bigger, more elaborate and extra glittery with each graduating class.
Believed to have been around since the late 1800s, prom — short for promenade — has humble origins in the high school gym.
Where once gals donned their Sunday best for a few hours of romance and dancing with a fellah in a matching boutonniere, today proms are major celebrations, spreading events over days and carrying a price tag equivalent to some mortgage payments.
According to the nationwide annual survey by Visa Inc., promgoers in Pennsylvania will spend on average $1,104 this year.
Dress and tickets are big-ticket givens. But today, promgoers strategize every detail from their hair, tan and fingernails to the vehicle they will travel in.
It's one of the last, big hoorahs of high school, and students look for ways to make the special event, well, extra special.
That special event happened Friday night for students at Slippery Rock, Butler and Karns City high schools. Students at Seneca Valley and Allegheny-Clarion Valley high schools have their proms Saturday night.
“I'm very excited,” said Paige Foley, a senior at Seneca Valley High School.Foley will attend Seneca's prom Saturday night with her good friend, Ben McConohy.The two are in the same pottery class, and McConohy went the extra mile in issuing the invite. He made Foley a mug and inscribed on the bottom: “Prom with Ben?”“It was cute,” said Foley, who also plays on the school softball team and is in the national honor society.Unique and creative ways to woo an escort, called “proposals” are a current trend, with invites coming in the form of publicly posted messages, invites written in icing on cupcakes or cookies or even tucked into cracker jack boxes or fortune cookies.For Foley, the mug was a winner.For the big day, she's planning to get a manicure and have her hair styled into an updo to complement a fancy feature to the back of her dress.Foley describes her red sequin and bead gown as elegant, classy and “more grown up” looking then anything she's worn in the past. She didn't want to share a photograph because she's holding off for the big reveal on prom night.Some of her classmates joined together and created an online social media page to share photographs of their dresses in advance. The purpose of the site, Foley explained, is to help prevent buying the same dress as a friend.“You don't want to risk looking like someone else,” said Foley who resisted the urge to post her dress because it's among a limited number produced by Ohio fashion designer Diaa.“He designed it, and I picked it,” she said, noting that “It's not one of a kind, but it's close and I just want to surprise everyone by revealing it on prom night ... Next to graduation this is the last big thing.”Foley, daughter of Patrick and Celeste Foley of Cranberry Township, is set to attend Grove City College to major in mechanical engineering.Prom memories last a lifetime. Here are a few from years past:
Pat (Stover) McCafferty recalls her dance card getting fairly busy for her senior prom in 1947.But in the end only one fellah — the man she attended with — would win out big. McCafferty married her date, Frank, a year after the prom.“And it lasted,” she said.Pat, a year younger than Frank, said the couple had been courting about a year when he asked her to attend Butler High's prom. Frank was attending Allegheny College, and Pat was not only secretary of her class, but voted most popular.To prepare for the event, Pat's mother sewed her dress. And Pat was able to pick the exact color she wanted: Blue organdy.“(Mom) got to decide on the lengths, of course,” said Pat, who styled her own naturally curly hair in pin curls and wore a corsage.They attended the prom at the armory on North Washington Street in a car owned by Frank's father. Pat bought special shoes, but that was pretty much the extent of the planning.“It wasn't really that involved then,” she said.Of course there was dancing. Think Bing Crosby and Perry Como. And a duty of her date was to walk a card with numbers on it around the event. Gentleman signed the card for a chance to dance with Pat.“I still have that card,” Pat said with a girlish giggle.
After dancing all night, Lisa Kellerman walked home in her lacy gown and stocking feet.Kellerman, who was Lisa Andersen when she went to Butler High's senior prom in 1976, already had a driver's license so she and a bunch of her friends went to the high school cafeteria event in her car.After returning all of her friends and her date, Geoff Brown, to their homes at night's end, Lisa ran out of gas less than a mile from her Meridian home.“Of course the shoes were off by then,” said Kellerman, who now chuckles at the snafu.It didn't ruin her experience though. “I wouldn't change a thing,” chuckles Kellerman, 55. “We had a great time.”Kellerman said no one should miss their prom. It's a once in a lifetime experience.She highly recommends following her lead and attending the big event with a friend.“There's no pressure. You can just enjoy yourself,” she said.After being invited, Kellerman said she and a friend selected similar dresses, which she described and “frilly.” Kellerman's gown was medium dusty blue and in the “prairie style” that was “going on” in the Led Zeppelin era.“There were some girls who wore slinky dresses but that wasn't in style,” she said. “I thought my dress was very romantic.”Kellerman said her date provided a wrist corsage, but she did her own hair makeup and fingernails.Kellerman said a dozen promgoers met at a friend's house, then piled into a couple of vehicles to get to the high school.“We danced all night,” she said.Kellerman and her husband, Rock, have a daughter, Emily, now 22. By the time Emily went to her senior prom in 2010, things had changed a great deal.“For starters the price of the dresses went up dramatically,” Kellerman said. “It's very advanced now. They get their nails and hair done. They rent a limo and afterward they are always going away someplace. It's more like a wedding.”
“It was just a carefree experience,” 46-year-old Ken Savage of Slippery Rock said of his senior prom in 1986.Savage said he and his date, a friend named Pam Roth, double dated with another couple. They went in a pickup truck.The experience definitely was a highlight to his high school career, but was kept simple.The prom was at Slippery Rock University.“I bought flowers and picked her up at her house. Our moms helped us get ready,” said Savage, who lived in Prospect back in high school.Although he did rent a tux for his senior prom, Savage said a year beforehand he wore a suit to his junior prom.“It was all about being with good friends and listening to good music. It was nice,” he said.Popular tunes of the time would have been by Depeche Mode, Motley Crue and Poison.The likes of the Black Eyed Peas, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga were topping the charts when Savage and his wife Amy's children, 23-year-old Emily and 21-year-old Michael, took their turns at prom going.“By then there were so many more options,” he said. “Nail places, for example, are on every corner.”
“I still carry a photo in my wallet,” Jodi Aiken of Portersville said of her prom experience.Now a 37-year-old full-time mom of two, Aiken said for her the prom had one huge highlight: her date, Scotty McMillin.The pair, friends before the event and after, had a blast at Slippery Rock's 1994 senior prom. Aiken said the memory remains especially cherished as McMillin died in a car accident after high school graduation.“I'm so glad we went together. Going with him really made it special,” said Aiken, who saved up her earnings as a clerk at Cal's general store to buy her prom gown.“It was a short teal dress with sequins,” said Aiken, who recalls driving herself to the event. She and McMillin ate at a Red Lobster restaurant before the prom, and afterward they rode on the Gateway Clipper.She said she did get her hair done special, but because McMillin was “a little guy” at about 5-foot-1, “there were no heels for me. That didn't matter. We still had the best time.”
