By Daniel Thigpen
Record Staff Writer
LODI, CA – For decades, they danced to polka and socialized
over cabbage rolls. Many had fled harsh winters in the Dakotas
and now spent those months in much milder Lodi, Partying with
German friends and family.
Their shared heritage helped shape the town’s early population
and the Dakota Club of Lodi celebrated it for nearly 66 years.
In December, the party came to a quiet end in the local American Legion Hall, About 60 folks- almost what was left of
the club’s slowly declining of the club's slowly declining membership- dressed to the nines, met for one last dinner and sang a somber "Auld Lang Syne" farewell.
“We all had a little bit of tears.” Said La Vone Nies, 74, a decades-long club member before it folded. “Now some of those people you hardly see anymore.”
The Dakota Club did not meet an uncommon demise. Similar clubs in Lodi and beyond have reported struggles to recruit younger members as elders tire or die.
Cultural organizations in particular find there are a lot of youths who don’t have as direct a connection with their heritage as their parents and grandparents, who were born elsewhere, some say.
“Younger people just aren’t interested in clubs,” said Luella Bitz, Dakota Club’s final president. “And our kids were born here.”
Like the Dakota Club, the Lodi Italian Club has tried to mitigate dwindling membership by opening itself up to all ethnic groups.
M”It used to be that we had a waiting list,” said Joe Abba, 79, whose father, an Italian immigrant who moved to Acampo near the turn of the 20th century, was the first Lodi Italian Club President.
Abba said he has hope that the group can continue. He has children who are active in the club, often taking the reins from old-timers who don’t have the energy they once did to orchestrate elaborate gatherings.
“I’d really like to see it go on,” Abba said “when you get to be 80 years old, you don’t really feel like working on a crab dinner.”
The people who made up Lodi’s Dakota Club have a long, meandering history. Most members’ family trees begin in Germany, where many left their homeland in the 18th and 19 centuries for areas off the Black Sea. They escaped war by immigrating to the Dakotas and ended up in Lodi after the Great Depression looking for work.
Bitz was 19 when she caught a train for Sacramento to meet a brother and sister. She was done with winter in North Dakota.
“Forty-three below was cold enough for me,” said Bitz, now 69.
Bitz was one of the younger Dakota Club members in Lodi, as the group, formed in 1944, already had been running for some two decades by the time she arrived.
For Bitz and others, the club was a chance to socialize with friends and distant relatives in a festive setting. They danced the polka for hours on floats built for Grape Festival parade.
Much fundraising and planning would focus on the annual weekend-long Dakota Club picnic, where North Dakotans and South Dakotans competed in a yearly tug-of-war. North Dakota won every match except for two.
Membership peaked at about 300 people, but over time fell to about 74. Bitz said officers would have had to charge members too much in dues to stay afloat.
It was a phenomenon hard to imagine when Bitz first discovered the club.
“When I joined, there were people in their 90s,” Bitz said. “When people joined, they didn’t leave.”
Contact reporter Daniel
Thigpen at (209) 546-8254 or
dthigpen@recordnet.com.
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The organization was founded in 1994 by Richard Graber and