A 9-year-old fiddler keeps the old dance hall alive

Community dance halls are filling up again across the American West, including the Kearney Community Hall in Banner, a ranching town in northeast Wyoming. Caller Courtney Caplan spotted the decades-old building sitting abandoned and, in 2010, cut the lock off the door with bolt cutters. She and other musicians knew there was a big oak floor inside. "I knew it was a great floor for dancing, and that was reason enough to save the building," Caplan said. A nonprofit formed, fundraised one pie auction at a time to fix the leaky ceiling and holey floor, and reopened in 2017. Now twinkling lights hang from the wooden beams and quilts cover the walls. Scott Gall likes watching the older kids teach the little ones to dance, phones nowhere in sight. The board is aging, so the next mission is finding successors. One contender is Emerson, age 9, who plays fiddle on stage. She gets nervous, but keeps going because it brings people joy.