Before her 19th birthday, Gwynn Kellar performed ballet for U.S. troops throughout much of Europe, exchanged pleasantries with diminutive actor Mickey Rooney, and had even snuck into the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg. She also received a captain’s rank in the U.S. Army.

Kellar, who now lives in Flat Rock with her husband Jim, was one of 12 ballet dancers from New York’s Radio City Music Hall touring with the United Services Organization during the last leg of World War II. When her 87-year-old memory cannot recall the names of towns she visited or how many performances she gave (“139 in three months,” Kellar’s husband interrupts), she shakes her head and sighs. Luckily, she is able to retrieve a faded envelopefrom a hall closet stuffed with letters home to her parents in Brooklyn dated between July 1945 and January 1946. Her parents kept every letter from their 18-year-old daughter.

“I have seen some terrible sights. Some of the boys are covered from head to toe in casts and bandages, with only slits for their eyes and mouths. They appreciate us more than anyone else,” Kellar wrote in a letter home from Germany dated October 13, 1945. In addition to performing, she also visited wounded soldiers in European hospitals three afternoons a week.

Kellar thumbs through the faded newspaper clippings and tattered letters with perfectly manicured nails, her petite loafers barely making an imprint on her spotless white carpet. Jim squints at the grainy newspaper photos of the ballet dancers and the leggy Rockettes as they depart for Europe in July 1945. He picks out his wife standing next to Athena Kellar, his sister and Keller’s former roommate during her years dancing ballet on point in New York. The couple met six months later when Athena introduced her brother to Kellar. Jim had recently returned to New York from his service in the Pacific. The couple married in 1949 and had four children and seven grandchildren.

Jim helps trigger Kellar’s memory, even teasing her about her pampered stint as an army captain. All the performers were automatically given the rank to protect them in the event of their capture.

“They [U.S. officers] were doing everything, and you were just sitting in the truck,” Jim chides Kellar, who blushes and nods her head. Jim recalls that USO shows were beyond description. “I was three years living in tents in jungles, and to see an American girl was just unbelievable,” he comments.

Kellar laced her first pair of point shoes when she was five years old and auditioned for the Radio City Music Hall when she was 16. After landing a regular spot as a dancer and a weekly $32 salary, she lived in a hotel and took time off from school. She performed in four shows a day, every day of the week. “The truant officer said my mother should be put in jail for letting me take a whole month off of school,” Kellar laughs.

After a request from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fulfill recreational needs for the increasing U.S. armed forces, six civilian agencies formed the USO in New York in 1941. Kellar was one of the 7,000 USO performers that traveled overseas to entertain U.S. troops during the war. She auditioned separately for a spot with the tour, which also featured famous faces like Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney.

“Guess who is sleeping in the room next to mine? Mickey Rooney! He’s a terrific person,” Kellar wrote in a letter home. “I had a really long talk with him last night. People say he’s a show off, but he’s not. He’s a sincere, down-to-earth boy. He writes his wife every day. Do you know he’s shorter than I am?”

Kellar often included accounts of destroyed buildings in bombed European towns and endless meals of “spam and beans” in her letters home. But they’re not all reflective of the horrors of war. She described her social activities during her off days, which most likely involved flirting with the U.S. soldiers, who were eager to set their eyes on American girls.

“Of course, at night I’ve been going out with GIs. Athena and I are very proud of ourselves as we haven’t given an officer a date yet,” she wrote home in a letter dated Aug. 1, 1945. “You should have seen us last night. The two dates we had took us to an enlisted man’s dance. Being that we were the only two American girls in the place, we were just mobbed. They all formed a line to dance with us. Most of the boys hadn’t danced with an American girl in two years.”

Kellar would eventually go on a date with an officer, one of the medics with a bronze and a silver star. The officer’s name was Jack Held, and he makes his first appearance in one of Kellar’s letters home on Sept. 21, 1945. In a letter dated four days later from Salzburg, Austria, Kellar wrote, “We’re very much alike in many respects. The only trouble is that he’s Catholic. Mom and Pop, what do you say about me marrying a Catholic?”

Kellar continued to write Held, mentioning in a letter dated December 20, 1945 that Held joked he was “chasing a girl all over Germany and Austria.” In the same letter, she wrote, “his religion means more to him than anything in the world, and as long as he feels that way, and I feel the way I do, we can never marry.” Her next few sentences quickly moved onto the Mickey Rooney encounter.

Kellar remembers particular events quite vividly, such as attending the Nuremberg trials in December 1945. The first series of trials, which prosecuted major leaders of the Nazi party, ran from November 1945 to October 1946 in the German town of Nuremberg. Since no USO performers were allowed to attend the trials, Kellar said she dressed as a secretary to sneak in.

“All week long I’d been promoting deals to get in, but no luck because the Army said no USO performers were allowed. So yesterday morning this captain calls me (8:00 in the morning) and tells me to dress in civilian clothes and hurry down,” Kellar wrote in a letter dated December 20 from Nuremberg.

Kellar’s weekly bridge partner and fellow Flat Rock retiree, Gail Zink, says it was like pulling teeth to get Kellar to talk about her performing days. Pictures of the young dancer around the house on bridge days provoked questions, and Zink said Kellar gradually revealed more details. In fact, Zink laughs about how nervous Kellar said she was before speaking on Veteran’s Day at the Sammy Williams senior center in Hendersonville.

“She said she was scared to death. She had to bring her husband along for moral support,” Zink says.

Kellar seems humble today, disregarding stories of dates with GIs and backstage costume changes with a nonchalant wave of her hand. But her letters home reveal an eager teenage girl caught in one of history’s darkest times.

But as Kellar puts it, “When you’re 18, life’s a ball.”

Compiling a list of great tap routines is no easy task. But these 5, in order of earliest to latest, represent, to me, the best form, technique, plus a wow factor that makes them stand out.

Gold Diggers of 1935

A huge cast, innovative camera angles, striking lighting effects, reverse motion film, remarkable sets, Broadway presentation, and raw hoofin’ all come together in this tour de force of choreography and cinematography courtesy of Busby Berkeley.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire at their best in “Pick Yourself Up” from Swingtime, 1936.  What makes this routine special is the intricate footwork and perfect unison between the two.

Nicholas Brothers “Jumpin’ Jive” from the film Stormy Weather Fred Astaire called this the greatest tap number on film, and it’s easy to see why.

Gene Kelly rollerskating while tapping routine from It’s Always Fair Weather, 1953 Sure Gene had many wonderful numbers, but this joyful dance reminds me of why he as so great.

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Representing the Irish roots of tap and the art of Stepdancing - Riverdance - Lord of the Dance

Peg Leg Bates(October 11, 1907-December 8, 1998) was born Clayton Bates in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, the son of Rufus Bates, a laborer, and Emma Steward Bates, a sharecropper and housecleaner. He began dancing when he was five. At twelve, while working in a cotton-seed gin mill, he caught and mangled his left leg in a conveyor belt. The leg was amputated on his kitchen table at his home.

Though he was left with only one leg and a wooden peg leg his uncle carved for him, Bates resolved to continue dancing. “It somehow grew in my mind that I wanted to be as good a dancer as any two-legged dancer,” he called. “It hurt me that the boys pitied me. I was pretty popular before, and I still wanted to be popular. I told them not to feel sorry for me.” He meant it. He began imitating the latest rhythm steps he saw dancers of metal-tap shoe dancers, adding his own novelty and acrobatic steps into the taps.

He worked his way from minstrel shows and carnivals to the vaudeville circuits. Relearning how to dance with his wooden peg leg, Bates worked his way upward from minstrel shows and carnivals to the vaudeville circuits. At fifteen, after having become the undisputed king of one-legged dancers, able to execute acrobatic, graceful soft shoe, and powerful rhythm-tapping all with one leg and a peg, he established a professional career as a tap dancer.

In 1930, after dancing in the Paris version of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1929, Bates returned to New York to perform as a featured tap dancer at such famous Harlem nightclubs as the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and the Club Zanzibar. On Broadway in the 1930s, he reinvented such popular tap steps as the Shim Sham Shimmy, Susie-Q, and Truckin’ by enhancing them with the rhythmic combination of his deep-toned left-leg peg and the high-pitched metallic right-foot tap. As one of the black tap dancers able to cross the color barrier, Bates joined performers on the white vaudeville circuit of Keith & Lowe and performed on the same bill as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly.

In 1949 Bates sang and danced the role of the swashbuckling pirate, Long John Silver in the musical review Blackouts. “Don’t give up the ship, although you seem to lose the fight; life means do the best with all you got, give it all your might,” he sang in the Ken Murray musical that played for three years at the Hollywood and Vine Theatre in Hollywood, California.

Wearing a white suit and looking as debonair as Astaire, Bates made his first television appearance in 1948 on This Is Show Business (a show hosted by Clifford Fatiman and Arlene Francis), performing high-speed paddle-and-roll tapping and balancing on his rubber-tipped peg as if it were a ballet pointe shoe. On the Ed Sullivan Show in 1955, Bates strutted his stuff as he competed in a tap challenge dance, countering Hal LeRoy’s wiggly steps with airy wing-steps. “You’re not making it easy,” Bates chided, as he tossed off heel clicks and soared into a flash finish with Trenches (his body leaning forward on the diagonal and the legs kicking high to the back). Bates made over twenty appearances on the Ed Sullivan Television Show, last appearing in a tap challenge dance with “Little Buck” on August 22, 1965.

While television gave him greater notoriety than ever before, Bates continued to pursue a variety of performance venues. In 1951, he invested his earnings and with his wife, Alice, purchased a large turkey farm in New York’s Catskill Mountains and converted it into a resort, The Peg Leg Country Club. The date of his marriage to Alice is not known; it lasted until her death in 1987. They had one child.

The Peg Leg Country Club in Kerhonkson, New York flourished as the largest black-owned-and-operated resort in the country, catering to black clientele and featuring hundreds of jazz musicians and tap dancers. “During the prejudice years, country clubs were not integrated,” said Bates, “and I started thinking how blacks might like to have a country resort just like any other race of people.”

After selling the property in 1989, Bates continued to perform and teach. He appeared before youth groups, senior citizens, and handicapped groups, spreading his philosophy of being involved no matter what life’s adversities and encouraging youngsters to be drug-free and to pursue an education. “Life means, do the best you can with what you’ve got, with all your mind and heart. You can do anything in this world if you want to do it bad enough,” he often said.

In 1992, Bates was Master of Ceremonies at the National Tap Dance Day Celebration in Albany, New York, where he received a Distinguished Leadership in the Arts Award. In 1991, Bates was honored with the Flo-Bert Award by the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day. He died in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, just a mile and a half from the place where he lost his leg.

A remarkable talent shown in this documentary clip:

Vaudeville once ruled the American live entertainment scene. For mere peanuts, an entire family could enjoy a show in an ornate theater on whose stage artists of all kinds took turns performing their well-honed acts. Acrobats, jugglers, comedians, singers, dancers, magicians, orators, trained animals and precocious kids filled the bill. Everything from gymnastics to pratfalls to pirouettes were seen. Everything from hot jazz licks to Shakespearean soliloquies to operatic arias to punch lines were heard. House musicians in the orchestra pit cued the action on stage. From the late 19th century through the 1910s, vaudeville was king.

With the advent of motion pictures and radio, two mediums that stole many of vaudeville’s best talents, this American art form went the way of variety and burlesque. Vaudeville hung on until the 1930s before finally succumbing to the movies. Vaudeville’s wide-ranging impact extended to the slapstick-screwball-sketch comedy routines and variety show formats that ex-vaudevillians brought to radio, film and television. Omaha’s own Maude Wangberg, age 108, is proud to count herself a veteran of vaudeville, a distinction few can claim today, as most of its artists are long gone now.

The former Maude Fodrea was born in Grand Island, Neb. on May 16, 1905 to Pennington Parker Fodrea and Blanche Watson. She was the youngest of three sisters. Her parents met and married in Grand Island. When her father, a manager with the Burlington Northern Railroad got a promotion, the family moved to Chicago. Blanche returned home to Grand Island to have her babies. When Maude was about 5, the family moved back to Grand Island after her father lost his job and her mother suffered a nervous breakdown. After her mother recovered, the family moved to Omaha, where her father got work, first as a reporter with the Omaha Bee, and then as advertising-sales manager for the Iten Biscuit Company.

Maude grew up near downtown, in a home at 2869 California Street long since gone in the wake of Creighton University campus expansion. She’s seen Omaha’s skyline rise and fall and rise again, just as she’s seen the city’s boundaries expand ever westward. She witnessed one mark to its landscape she’d rather forget — the devastation left behind by the 1913 Easter Sunday tornado. “Oh, yes. My family and I were out in Benson visiting my grandmother. Towards the middle of Sunday afternoon there was such a strange light in the sky and then it got real dark after awhile,” she said. “So my father and mother decided it just wasn’t safe to go out. No, it just didn’t look right. There was something wrong. So we stayed there all night and then the next morning we left. The streetcars were running. Nothing moving but them. No automobiles. No people. It was just very quiet. Just dead silence. On our way home we saw clothes hanging up in trees and trees down and, oh, things like that. We didn’t know if anything happened to our house or not. But everything was OK in that section of Omaha. There wasn’t anything bothered at all. That’s about all I remember of it. It was soon forgotten.”

If not for acting on a whim and studying dance as a girl Maude might have become a nun. Two of her classmates at Mount St. Mary, the forerunner to today’s Mercy High School, did. Maude grew up in a strict Catholic home at a time when a girl’s options were pretty much limited to marriage and motherhood, religious vocation, nursing, teaching or secretarial work. She chose dancing. Still cutting the trim figure of a dancer, the New Cassel Retirement Center resident defied convention to become a show girl in a vaudeville act called “The Whirl of Splendor.” The show took its name from the revolving stage that performers made entrances and exits on. She was part of an all-girl dance act that closed the show. In between dance numbers singers performed. Preceding Maude and the other chorines a couple did an adagio.

Sharing the bill with The Whirl were all manner of acts. Presented by New York City-based producer Meyer Golden, the popular show toured widely. Maude performed with the act from 1925 to 1930, a stretch that saw her mature into a woman. The Whirl followed the vaudeville circuit, playing Orpheum Theatres in and around New York, across Canada, down the west coast, the middle of America and then back east, but mostly playing the big Loews Theatres along the East Coast.

The act appeared at all the top vaudeville sites. Maude and company sometimes shared the bill with established stars like Sophie Tucker or legends-to-be like Edgar Bergen. Touring meant a hectic schedule spent in hotels, theatres and rehearsal halls, on trains and two shows a day or more on stage, seven days a week. “You played every place of any size. The bigger the city the more performances you had to do,” she said. Some audiences were livelier than others. “In Pennsylvania we played a lot of smaller places like Redding because the big steel mills were working then and the young men employed there had to have entertainment,” she said. “They would stomp their feet and whistle. It was fun then.”

There were other benefits too. “I loved traveling and seeing all those different places,” she said. “I loved New York. We were there during the Prohibition Era and there were speakeasies on almost every corner. We were in Washington, D.C. when the cherry blossoms were in bloom. New Orleans, I think that’s the most interesting city in the United States. I love the French Quarter. I used to stroll through there all the time. Just a wonderful place. Sorry about the flood. I would name San Francisco second (most interesting) because of the Wharf district…Chinatown..and all they have there.”

Dancing opened up a world of splendor to Maude, who learned under the tutelage of a petite, attractive Omaha woman named Adelaide Fogg, a friend of hoofers Fred and Adelle Astaire. In over a century of living Maude’s pretty much seen and done it all. Show biz accounted for a brief period in her life, but no matter how short her time in vaudeville it provided fond memories and linked her to a great tradition of which she’s one of the few survivors. Hers is the classic tale of a starry-eyed girl who ran away from the stodgy Midwest to see the bright lights of the big city and to dance amid the footlights and spot lights of the stage. She gleefully recalls how it is a gal from a convent school ended up a chorus girl. Fogg’s dance studio was in the ballroom of the ritzy Blackstone Hotel. She had a reputation as “the leading dancing teacher here,” according to Maude. “She went to New York every summer to get the latest dancing steps for her classes.”

Maude attended Duschene College for a time but the pull of dance made her leave. Saturday nights were reserved for Peony Park, where she and her future husband, John Wangberg, “would dance the night away” to the swing tunes of a live orchestra in the ballroom. But weekdays meant practice. Lots of practice. It wasn’t long before Maude was a star pupil of Fogg’s. She even conducted classes in Omaha when Fogg was away teaching in outstate Nebraska and in Iowa. At her mentor’s urging, Maude left home at age 20 to pursue a dancing career back East. Her father disapproved, suggesting she’d only come running back home disappointed, but her mother encouraged her. It was the chance of a lifetime. “

When Adelaide Fogg’s dancing master in New York wanted to form a dancing act he asked her to bring any of her dancers that would be interested to New York for him to see,” Maude said. “She asked several of us to go with her. Her mother always went with her in those days. They rented an apartment with two bedrooms. We girls had one bedroom, with all four of us jammed up in it, and she and her mother had the other bedroom. You could see the Hudson River from there.” Of the four girls from Omaha who went East, only Maude stayed, the others either getting married or soon tiring of The Life. Maude stuck with it. There were lots of good times. She and her roommate for most of those years in vaudeville, Edie, became fast friends.

There were also some tough times. Maude and Edie and the rest of the girls did a lot of growing up far from home and family. “You were on your own. Well, see, I was a convent girl and the other girls were just out of high school. Totally unsophisticated — that’s what we were. Totally new to everything. That’s the way it was.” Maude finally got “sick” of the $55 a week road grind and retired from the stage at 25. She resettled in Omaha, taking up with her old beau, John Wangberg, an RKO Pictures salesman. Much happened in between the time Maude went from girl next door to show girl and much more happened after she hung up her dancing shoes.

A mix of memories — good and bad — abound for Maude. Like sharing the bill with a young Milton Berle, whose mother traveled with him and “would go down into the audience when it was time for his act and start the laughing. We could tell her laugh standing back there in the wings.” Watching performers from the wings Maude and the other girls sometimes got “silly” and caused a ruckus, whereupon a flustered stage manager would shoo them away. It was a kind of game. Her last year on tour she got to perform at home, on the Orpheum stage. Friends and family saw her strut her stuff there and feted her at a banquet her dad put on. Twice, Maude was offered chances at stardom and twice she declined, once to lead a Paris revue and again to head a new vaudeville act. The prospect of Paris came soon after arriving in New York, she said, and “it scared me to death.

” She wasn’t ready for such an opportunity so early in her career. Besides she said, “I didn’t have any ambitions, so I didn’t really envision myself as a big dancer all by myself. I never really thought about that.” The chance to be a vaudeville headliner came after she already decided she’d had enough. “I don’t know what came over me, but I kept telling myself, You don’t want to do this anymore — you need to go home.” So home she went. On the very next train. Like many a star-struck girl she fancied a fling at Hollywood but never could work up the courage to go try her luck there.

Following her abrupt departure from the stage she opened her own dance school at the Elks Club. Just as Adelaide Fogg did for her, Maude did for young girls. Hard times came with the Great Depression. “My father lost a lot of his money. Things were just pretty sad for awhile there around home,” she said. Given this reversal of fortune, Maude and John opted for a small wedding. His job took them to Kansas City. He rose through the RKO ranks to become regional manager. When his job required relocating to the South, the couple lived out of hotels in various cities and states. They returned to Kansas City, visiting their folks in Omaha on weekends. With John on the road a lot, a “lonely” Maude began adoption proceedings for their only child, Lorraine. After nearly 60 years of marriage, Maude lost John in the early 1990’s.

Today, she keeps active working crossword puzzles (in ink), reading, watching TV and going to mass. Her love for dance is always near and it doesn’t take much prodding for her to recall her days on stage. Even though Maude claims her passion for it’s all in the past, her daughter says her octogenarian mother is “always up for dancing at parties,” where she’ll demonstrate a few steps to anyone interested. At 108, she’s still gotta dance!