Doug’s First Flood Gig

#184 / Flood Time Capsule: 2000

Twenty-three years ago, just six week after he came on board as the band’s new bassist, Doug Chaffin played his first Flood gig. Freshly reconstituted as a quartet, The Flood provided entertainment for the Huntington YWCA’s Benefit Buffet Variety Show and Dance.

For the night, the band donated its services, because money was needed to repair the roof for one of Huntington’s storied and honored institutions. The YWCA by then had been in the city for nearly 80 years, a turn-of-the-century outgrowth of the Huntington Business Women’s Club.

As eminent local author James E. Casto has reported in his “Lost Huntington” series in The Herald-Dispatch, the Y was forced by the Great Depression to give up its facilities on 3rd Avenue, “so Mrs. George Patterson, the organization’s president in 1932-34, allowed it to use part of her three-story home at 633 5th Ave. … In 1940, Mrs. Patterson gave her 5th Avenue home to the YWCA, inaugurating an era of expansion for the organization.”

In 1952, a large auditorium/recreation room addition was built at the rear of the home, the same space in which The Flood played on that February night nearly 50 years later.

“It was fun for a good cause,” Charlie told his mom in an email later about giving the fundraisers two hours of music in exchange for food and drink, “and provided a good shakeout session for the new arrangements before we spring 'em on any paying jobs.”

The guys had already had a pre-shakeout shakeout earlier in the week, when they rehearsed at the Chaffins’ place in Ashland.

“We caravaned over to Doug's house,” Charlie wrote his mom, “where he had a bunch of people waiting to hear us. It turned out to be a little mini concert, a good setting for us to try out the tunes. We did our two sets, straight through, taking a break for coffee in between.”

At the Y show itself, the four Floodsters got there to find twinkling lights over the stage, a huge dance floor separating the stage from the audience and an honest-to-goodness disco ball over the center.

“We commented,” Charlie wrote, “that we hadn’t seen one of those for a while. And dance they did. The folks used the floor to dance to everything from the jug band tunes to ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and ‘Misty.’”