Making the Central City Scene
#487 / Flood Time Capsule: 2003
If you had dropped by Madison Avenue and W. 14th Street 22 years ago this week, you would have found The Flood rocking it on a flatbed truck (and blocking the road).
It was all part of the 11th annual Old Central City Days festival, and the band was posted just yards away from the site of Joe Dobbs’s original Fret ‘n Fiddle store.
As noted, Joe and his brother Dennis created FnF in 1977 and while by 2003 Joe had been gone from the neighbor for near 25 years, he still had West Huntington friends.
Central City was a separate town a century ago, and the name now refers to the three blocks of antique shops along West 14th Street.
For the 2003 edition of the festival celebrating Central City’s heritage, the organizers had $3,000 for their entertainment budget. Because they couldn’t agree on how to spend it, they ending up giving $1,000 to each block with which each could hire its own entertainers. The Flood was hired by the 600 block planners who placed the guys on the flatbed.
“In the 700 block was supposed to be a group called the Harmonicats at the same time,” Charlie Bowen told his mom in a later email, “and in the 500 block was a gunfighter show. These are very short blocks.
Shootouts on W. 14th Street
“We figured we could take the Harmonicats, but didn’t want to go up against guns,” Charlie added. “As it turns out, the Harmonicats didn’t show, and after we’d been playing 45 minutes, a tall gunfighter dressed all in black came up to us and explained that their show was supposed to start 15 minutes ago but the band was drowning them out.”
Band manager Pamela Bowen told him her guys would do two more songs and quit. Immediately after the second song ended, the gunfire began.
Covering the Central City festivities for The Herald-Dispatch, writer Dave Lavender noted that year’s festival theme was "Wild West 14th Street," and that the gunfighters were brought in from Fort Worth, Texas. Gun-toting had the crowd rolling, especially when the desperadoes got local folks to come out of the audience for the Quick Draw Challenge.
Joe’s Cowboy Past
Incidentally, the gunfighters brought back rare memories for Joe Dobbs. After that day’s show, the fiddler told his band mates about a favorite gig of his from 40 years earlier.
Back in 1965 — just two years before he moved his family to West Virginia — Joe landed a summer job in Silverton, Colorado, playing the sheriff in a tourist show.
As Joe’s daughter, Diana Johnson, recalls, “They did a skit two times daily for the tourists coming in on the train from Durango. Dad shot the bad guy off the roof, then they all went to the Bent Elbow Saloon to drink and play music.”
In Diana’s picture above, Joe is the handsome handlebar-mustached hombre chatting with the leggy lass at the center of the bar.