TEEN SCENE AND THE PURPLE CIGAR
From the Re-Echo, December 2007

Here’s a subject we hope someone will set us straight on. It involves two dance clubs that existed for a short time in 1967 and 1968. The problem is that we don’t know exactly where they were and they seem to have overlapped.

A groovy place in 1967 was the Hullaballoo Scene. In 1967, a woman named Mrs. Barbara Jacoby of Wayzata asked the City Council for a dance hall permit to operate a teenage night club. She said she held a $17,000 franchise from Teen Clubs International, and was negotiating a lease at 6520 Cambridge Ave. (in the heart of Skunk Hollow) to open a club called “TV’s Hullabaloo Teen Scene,” one of 70 such clubs across the country. It was a tight vote, but the Park Council is always pretty ready to say yes, and it was approved. She said her goal was to be open on May 12, 1967. It must have happened, as the July 2, 1967 TMC Insider announced that "Bob Goffstein of Marsh Productions reports The Sparklers were voted by the Hullabaloo Scene as the Twin Cities most promising band, and that the group will act as a house band for the new St. Louis Park Club." She was approved to operate on a month-to-month basis, at least through October 1967.

Other evidence: there is an ad for a place with just such a name at 6514 Cambridge in the Robin Hood Days Program in August 1967. Still more evidence is in a tape of the day the Monkees took over KDWB for four hours the day of their concert at the St. Paul Auditorium, August 4, 1967. During the show it was announced that on the following day, admission to the Hullabaloo Scene in St. Louis Park was only 97 cents (plus tax) - and an empty carton of Fresca. City Council minutes don't mention the place in 1968 except to say that Mrs. Jacoby owed them money.

And then there was the Purple Cigar, which was apparently at the same location as the Teen Scene (6514 Cambridge). The club was owned by Arnie Sagarski, hence the name. We know that a teen dance (ages 16-20) was held at the "purple playground" as a part of Robin Hood Days in August 1967. For $1.50 you could dance to the Stillroven, and free records were offered for “the first 200 swingers.” In January 1968, the club had to get a permit to hold "dances" from the City Council, which granted them on a month-to-month basis. Neighbors from along Cambridge came to protest. In March they were approved through June, but they had to have at least five Hennepin County Sheriffs on duty. Sagarski was looking for an alternate site. Renewal of the permit may have been due to the testimony of Victor Olson, Youth Director of Westwood Hills Lutheran Church, who said that Sagarski was doing a good job of operating the club. Today, the closest thing to 6520 or 6514 Cambridge is 6530 Cambridge, an industrial and commercial building at the end of the street at Edgewood.

If anyone has any additional information about these two St. Louis Park teen clubs or the people who ran them, please let us know.

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This information comes from a variety of sources: newspapers, books, yearbooks, phone directories, interviews, etc. Given the varied sources, we cannot guarantee that all of this information is correct, and welcome any additions and corrections. Please contact us with your contributions and comments.