Question: What is the history of The Shack youth center?

-- Richard Zamarripa, Fresno

Answer: The youth center originally called The Roost opened on May 27, 1944, in a former nightclub building on Kearney Boulevard at former Tehama Street. Tehama was renamed Thorne Avenue in 1956.

Sponsored by the Fresno Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Saturday night club for high school-age youth moved to the YMCA in the fall.

Organizers expected about 450 students to attend the opening-night event on Nov. 4, 1944. But after the football game between Fresno High and Fresno Technical High was canceled, more than 600 students crammed the dance floor and game room.

A high school band called The Quintet played for dancing. Games included badminton, ping-pong, shuffleboard, checkers and chess. A snack bar provided sodas, sandwiches and candy bars. A "floor show" produced by high school students was put on at 11:30 p.m.

Parent Teacher Association members served as chaperones at The Roost, but the students planned and ran the activities.

"Anything they wanted to do, I let them try," said Betty Davies Drummond in a 1967 Bee story. "The youngsters ran the show. We adults were merely there to give advice." Drummond was adult director of the center from 1945 to 1951.

By December 1944, more than 1,300 local high school students had joined The Roost and sponsors began looking for a bigger space.

By July 1945, the youth center was called The Shack, but there is no mention in Bee stories from the time to explain the name change.

In January 1946, The Shack moved from the YMCA to a ballroom at Tuolumne Street and Broadway. A few weeks later, Fresno's City Commission -- the forerunner of the City Council -- approved the youth center's use of the Fresno Civic Auditorium at Kern and L streets. But the move was delayed until that June because the auditorium was being used as a dormitory for servicemen returning to Fresno after World War II.

By September 1946, The Shack was heralded as "one of the finest youth centers in the state," according to a Bee story.

On Oct. 18, 1946, Fresno's "teen age population ... packed the Fresno Memorial Auditorium to the rafters ... to squeal in ecstasy at the songs of their idol, Frank Sinatra."

Sinatra's benefit concert was held at the larger Memorial Auditorium. It raised more than $4,000 for The Shack, and he was given a gavel as the first honorary president of The Shack. Most of the money was used to buy "stage equipment, library books, [and] phonograph records" for the center.

By 1947, more than 2,000 high school and junior high students were members of The Shack, and Saturday dances drew about 600. A Bee editorial that year credited the center with preventing "juvenile delinquency."

The Shack was later sponsored by the Fresno Youth Council and was under the umbrella of the Community Chest, a forerunner of the United Way.

After The Shack's budget was cut in 1951, the center moved back to the ballroom on Tuolumne but ceased operation later that year.

Q: My late father-in-law, Marion "Mulligan" Bixler, played with the Arkansas Ramblers. I've heard bits and pieces of the band's story from family members, but what is the history?

-- Vicki Bixler, Fresno

A: Marion Bixler and his brothers. Clarence, Hank and Pete of Selma, along with Ronald Hughey of Fowler, formed the Arkansas Ramblers country music band in the late 1920s and played barn dances and radio shows until 1932.

All the musicians were self-taught. Hughey came from a family of musicians. As boys, the Bixler brothers "banged on tubs for drums" and improvised horns from garden hoses and funnels, Hank Bixler said.

According to a Bee story about a reunion of band members in 1970, Clarence stopped playing the guitar after he accidentally shot himself in the hand several years before. Marion stopped playing the harmonica on the advice of his doctor. "I run out of compression," he said. He died in 1990.

Hank moved to Los Angeles and played guitar at clubs through the 1940s. Pete continued to play mandolin and fiddle through the years. He died in 1998.

Hughey, who at 16 was the youngest member when the band formed, kept playing fiddle after it folded. At the time of the reunion, Hughey was the California fiddling champion. The California State Old-Time Fiddlers Association awards a Ron Hughey Perpetual Trophy each year in his memory. He died in 1974.