Like millions of her 1950s teenage peers, Kathryn Sacchetti spent hours watching American Bandstand on television every weekday afternoon. Unlike the vast majority of those peers, however, she lived just a few miles from the Philadelphia studio where the show originated and knew many of the kids who were regulars on the show.
But, despite her many "Bandstand friends," Sacchetti never appeared on the show herself.
“My father was a very strict Italian," Sacchetti explains. "He said I don’t want my daughter shaking her you-know-what on TV. She’s got to come home, do her homework and help her mother in the kitchen.”
That's not to say that Sacchetti didn't enjoy dancing. She and her friends learned the latest steps by watching Bob Horn's Bandstand well before the show went national. They practiced those steps at neighborhood gatherings, often in the basements of the rowhouses of her southwest Philadelphia neighborhood near 64th and Buist.
It was at such a gathering, Sacchetti says, that she taught a young Kenny Rossi how to dance. Rossi's mother loved having the neighborhood kids hanging around her house. That included some of the most popular teenagers in the nation -- Justine Carrelli, Pat Molittieri, Arlene Sullivan and Dotty Horner.
Among Sacchetti's Bartram High classmates were Danny Rapp, Joe Terranova and Dave White of Danny & the Juniors. Sacchetti's mother was a close friend of the mother of Peggy Leonard, another American Bandstand regular. Carole Higbee lived up the street and would come over to the Sacchetti home after Bandstand and tell Kathryn who she had danced with that day. Rossi's cousin was the maid of honor at Sacchetti's wedding and other Bandstand regulars like Frankie Lobis, Joe Fusco and Mary Anne Cuff also showed up at Rossi's house.
Sacchetti, who sang in the school choir, tried to bring a future Philadelphia recording icon into the group. Patricia Holt was already a popular member of the Beulah Baptist Church choir when Sacchetti approached her.
“I asked her, ‘Patti, why don’t you come and sing in the choir?’ She said ‘Oh no. I don’t have the nerve.’ She sang in her father’s church and she was shy in school. Life is so funny.”
A few years later, Holt would be popular recording star Patti LaBelle.
Sacchetti said she misses growing up in her "tight Italian and Irish neighborhood" during what she described as "an innocent time for us."
Although she never appeared on Bandstand, people who saw her dancing as a young adult assumed she picked up her dancing skills on the show. She said you could tell where a person was from by the way they danced.
“You could tell a South Philly dancer by the steps. It was recognizable. Like North Philly did a lot of hand and arm movements. South Philly was more shaky, like from the hips. In Southwest Philadelphia it was like a combination of that.”
She once winced while watching a group in a club performing At the Hop.
"They had the choreography all wrong," she said.
She went to the lead singer and gave a quick lesson on the proper steps. “I said, if you’re going to do Danny’s songs …"
Sacchetti misses the music of the early Bandstand era, and the lifestyle.
“It was a foundation that you had when you were growing up, with your parents and your home. The mother wasn’t out working. It was a different era. I feel bad because today it’s not like that."
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. Go here to learn the story behind the writing of Bandstandland or here to listen to the Pennsylvania Cable Network's interview with author Larry Lehmer.
Larry Lehmer's book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Photo: Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles
