For Betty Spooner, Dancer
Editor’s note: Originally published September 21, 2017. Republished March 25, 2021.
Her mother had three daughters. Then, much later, Betty was born.
A surprise child.
Her mother ran Spooner & Spooner Confectionary on Bond Street, down the street from the Anchor Tavern.
Her teenage sisters were in charge of watching young Betty while their mother worked. The sisters were more interested in boys than babysitting.
As an infant, Betty was placed on an ironing board. She fell and landed on her head. She sustained nerve damage—movement in her limbs was restricted. For the rest of her life Betty Spooner couldn’t smile on one side of her face.
Her grandmother sent young Betty to Cornish Dance School in Seattle to see if the kid could regain coordination.
A child star was born.
Betty started giving dance lessons at age 14 in the back room of the candy store on Bond Street. To recruit students she called through the phone book, starting with A. By the time she got to Z she had a dozen pupils.
By age 16 she had enough students to open her own studio above the Sport Center Tavern on Hewitt.
Right after high school she married a boom man from the Weyerhauser mill, had two children. She taught ballroom, theatrical, jazz, character, hula, and Tahitian dancing.
She trained kids to dance in a Mickey Mouse Club show on Saturdays at the Fox Theatre.
Choreography and dance instruction—they were good hobbies, a nice side income.
Courtesy of Mike Jordan, via the Everett Museum of History
The phone rang one afternoon in 1938. Her husband and brothers-in-law had been killed in a car accident. Log truck rolled over on them. Betty screamed into the telephone when she heard the news.
She was in the process of buying a home with her now deceased husband. That plan immediately fell through.
Betty Spooner was widowed in the midst of the Great Depression.
In desperation Betty moved herself, her children, and her mother into the dance studio on Hewitt. It was one big room. She made makeshift bedrooms at night on the window side of the studio by hanging sheets from clotheslines.
In the evenings, in the dance studio, the sound of Glenn Miller records came up through the floor. So did the smell of cigarette smoke and booze. Downstairs, around the corner, there was a whorehouse. Drunken sailors accidentally knocked on the door looking for a good time. Betty would give them dance lessons if they paid. No funny business.
More than once Betty’s mother bounced a rowdy seaman by swinging a claw hammer at them until they backed down the alley stairs.
Betty would make good money spinning sailors around the room, four hours at a time, $6 an hour. She could teach any gin-soaked navy man how to foxtrot. Good money for her hungry kids.
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Betty Spooner taught dance and saved her cash. She moved to a newer, bigger studio at 2821 Rockefeller.
She married another guy. In a few years he proved to be a lousy drunk, the type to drink up the money and then grovel at the base of the stairs to be let back in. His whiskey habit drained the savings she had stashed to buy spring dance costumes for her students.
Things got worse. Years of pirouettes took a toll on Betty’s legs. She suffered arthritic pain, had to rub her calves for almost an hour in the mornings to get going. The price paid for years of ballet dancing.
She had a mastectomy that left a lot of scar tissue—devastating to someone who had for so long been praised for her figure.
She had money problems. No matter how hard she worked the studio kept losing business.
One day she had enough of the hustle. She drove her car at 100 miles an hour into a light pole.
The curtains came down for Betty Spooner one last time. She was fifty-five years old.
Some people… all the bad things happen to them. It’s hard to say why.
Until a few years ago Betty Spooner’s name was still on the building at 2821 Rockefeller. I still think of her as I walk past on the way to get a beer at The Independent.
This one’s for you, Betty Spooner. May you always be remembered as a dancer.
I think of your lopsided smile.
Richard Porter is a writer for Live in Everett. He lives here and drinks coffee.
