In late 1983, The Victory Young Adult Nightclub opened at Sixth and Main streets as a booze-free hangout for teens. If you weren’t around then, trust me when I say it opened in the nick of time.
Michael Jackson introduced most of the planet to the moonwalk on television earlier that year, proving as monumental to Generation X as the moon landing was to our parents. I was 15 then, and every teen I knew was moonwalking everywhere — in our bedrooms and kitchens, on crowded sidewalks, at Triplets games at Bosse Field, through school hallways and restaurants, occasionally at church — until someone had the bright idea to open the old disco and corral all us backward-sliding dorks into one safe space.
The Victory was billed as the “Tri-State’s largest disco” in 1980, but then the owners introduced a mechanical bull (which is never the solution you think it is). Adults eventually stopped showing up, so the owners took out the booze and the bull and let the kids have the rest of it.
Which meant that more than 5,000 neon, black, and strobe lights, plus spinning mirror balls, a world-class sound system, and a 32-by-40-foot dance floor calibrated to “Saturday Night Fever”-level illumination were all ours. Owners threw in a $3 cover charge to make us feel really grown up, and newspapers listed The Victory in the “Nightlife” sections alongside the Village Saloon, Funky’s II, and the Executive Inn.
On weekend nights, I’d spend 40 minutes trying to put in my contact lenses. Then, I’d apply copious amounts of hairspray and Drakkar Noir cologne — all the while moonwalking in the bathroom — before Mom dropped me off Downtown to join up to 2,000 other highly flammable, parachute-panted high school students.
The Victory was our “American Bandstand,” our “Soul Train.” With NBC’s “Friday Night Videos” and MTV as our guide, we youngsters knew that we were the future. We were hungry like the wolf. We wore our sunglasses at night. Maybe the adults had all turned square, but music was embroidered into our existence and we were never, ever going to stop dancing.
Even when Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire while filming that Pepsi commercial, we kept dancing. After Hoosiers basketball coach Bob Knight threw a chair across Assembly Hall, we danced. “We Are the World” was released, and somehow we danced. New Coke was introduced to the country, and so was Dan Quayle. The Berlin Wall fell, as did the stock market — and still we danced.
In February 1985, the cameras started rolling on Friday nights for an MTV-style show called “Party Tyme,” which aired on WEHT Channel 25 at 1:30 Sunday mornings. We danced until midnight Sunday and got home in time to watch ourselves dancing on TV from Friday night.
For one brief, shining moment, The Victory spun as the hormone-raging center of our Flashdancing, Footloosing universe. We had the music, the lights, and the aromas of perfume and sweat-soaked nylon, and we thought the music would never stop.
In 1988, The Victory’s property manager said it was the longest-running under-21 club in the country. I had moved to Bloomington for college by then and was far away when, in June 1991, The Victory flipped back to an adult nightclub, but I’m sure I felt something, some odd pang of loss that I couldn’t explain, probably in my feet.
I’m truly sad for all those young adults who came after us with nothing but the internet to entertain themselves. Today, the Victory Theatre is an events space and home to the Evansville Philharmonic. I’m sure nobody there is tempted to bring back a mechanical bull, which is wise, but I have two more solid words of advice: more moonwalking.
