06/02/2026
Hula at the House of David!
We were recently given some excellent film footage of a Hawaiian-themed stage show, “Tropical Fantasy,” performed at the House of David (HOD) Amusement Park in August 1964.
The first featured dancer, Debbie Dennison from St. Joseph, aged 15, performs in a blue dress. The second dancer, Ramona Ampey of Stevensville, aged 17, wears a white bikini top and skirt in the footage. In the background, the HOD band accompanies them, wearing straw hats and Hawaiian shirts. Park entertainment director “Smiling” Bill Dragland can be seen behind Debbie and Ramona playing the Hammond organ.
Ramona’s mother Delores “Lulika” Hudson Ampey, and her aunt Loretta “Kamoa” Hudson Ferris, were professional hula dancers, members of the Aloha Maids, who toured in the 1940s with the Ray Kinney Orchestra. Kinney’s act was internationally famous in the 1930s-1940s, their music a mix of big band and traditional Hawaiian music. The Aloha Maids performed authentic hula dances onstage with the orchestra.
Originally from South Haven, Michigan, the Hudson sisters were not Kānaka Maoli (native Hawaiians) but they were indigenous, members of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma. When the pair left Kinney’s orchestra in 1945, they returned to Southwest Michigan, and started families. Kamoa and Lulika founded a wildly popular dance studio in St. Joseph, teaching Hawaiian and Polynesian dance for more than 40 years.
The talented and charismatic Kamoa married a professional musician, Joe Ferris, whom she met while touring with Kinney’s orchestra. Ferris had played in many of the leading groups of the big band era, including the orchestras of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey.
In Southwest Michigan, Joe became an in-demand musician and bandleader, often serving as music director at the HOD’s amusement park. Joe also taught music at and managed HOD-member Ruby Cady’s music store. When she retired, Joe bought out the business, which he and his son Michael then ran for over 50 years.
The equally charming and gifted Lulika married local factory foreman, Word War II veteran, and local Knights of Columbus leader Carlos Ampey, a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.
Bernice Mills Boyersmith, wife of ex-HOD baseball player Earl Boyersmith, took lessons at the Hawaiian studio and performed in some of the studio’s reviews. As did Marian Selby, wife of another ex-HOD ballplayer. Those connections along with Joe’s partnership with the HOD closely linked Kamoa and Lulika’s Hawaiian dance studio with the commune in the late 1950s and 1960s. From 1962 to 1965, each summer they staged Hawaiian- and Polynesian-themed dance reviews at the HOD’s Beer Garden Stage.
In fact, the dance studio, which taught both adults and children, was so popular that it kicked off a craze for authentic Hawaiian music and dancing in Southwest Michigan. The early- to mid-1960s was the era of the surfing craze, when teenagers were obsessed with all things tropical, surfing, and beach related, including Hawaiian dance. This was the era of “Surf Rock” acts, when “Beach Party” movies ruled the box office, and when beach- and surfing-themed TV shows were popular. But the fad’s popularity in the Twin Cities can be attributed in part to the frequent public appearances—at various performances, corporate events, trade shows, etc.—of the talented and beautiful Lulika and Kamoa, their gifted students, and the dance studio’s popularity.
In 1964, the studio’s star pupils, Ramona, Lulika’s daughter (who also taught at the studio), and Debbie performed their own featured act as part of the “Tropical Fantasy” show at the HOD. The footage we have shows a little under two minutes of that act.
Dennison, described as “a real firecracker,” was a dance prodigy from St. Joseph who became a professional dancer by the age of 16. She later moved to the islands to study Hawaiian dance. Debbie lived in Hawaii for many years and danced and modelled professionally in Chicago. She died in 2017 at the age of 68.
A graduate of Lakeshore High School in Stevensville, Ampey, now Ramona Sagataw, currently resides in Illinois. She had never seen the ’64 footage before and is excited to show it to her daughters and granddaughters—some of whom also dance the hula. We interviewed her about her HOD performances and her accomplished family. She shared memories with us about dancing on the Beer Garden stage, once as part of Tahitian dance trio “Two Flowers and a Weed,” which included her cousin Mike Ferris. She also remembered Debbie winning Chic Bell’s amateur contest in September 1962. Ramona also recalled meeting Chic, a renowned band leader and the colony’s entertainment director, as well as others in the HOD orbit, including Dragland, Cady, and the Boyersmiths. It was an honor to speak with Ramona.
