Another Famous Person from New Bedford, Massachusetts

Let me tell you about a "small world" experience. When I was 7 years old, my Aunt Marjorie enrolled me in a tap dance studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts, my home town. The studio was run by a man named Al Sanger.

I don't know how many boys were in the tap dancing class, but there sure were a lot of girls. I took a strong liking to one of the girls and during a recital, instead of going off to the side for a tap solo, I followed this girl off the stage and screwed the whole bit up. Everybody teased me about this for years.

Now.. fast forward to when I was 23 years old and just married. My wife and I rented the second floor of one of those three story tenements so popular in New Bedford. On the day that we moved in, we spent a long time talking to the landlady who lived on the first floor.

I don't know how the subject of dancing came up, but I mentioned that I had studied tap when I was 7 years old at Al Sanger's. When my new bride heard that, she said that she had also studied there when she was 4 years old. Suddenly, the landlady said that she had been an instructor at the studio at that time.. and guess what.. she remembered the names of the boy who screwed up and the girl he followed off the stage. Yes.. that boy was me.. and the girl was my bride!

She also mentioned that her fellow dance instructor was Carol Haney, who later went on to Broadway and a Tony award in 1955. I knew Carol because she lived one block from me, on the corner of Palmer and Court Street. I had been her family's paperboy for a few years.

I remember when she came back to New Bedford to see her family. She brought along her husband, Larry Blyden, who spent the day reading scripts on the front porch of his father-in-law's house. I thought that he was a funny looking guy because he wore great big horn-rimmed glasses, which were not popular yet at that time. Larry did a few movies but I don't think he ever made the big time. He and Carol were married from 1955 to 1962 and had 2 children together.

Carol went to Hollywood in the 1940's and became a protege of Gene Kelly. She was in the dancing chorus of lots of films, but made it big in the Broadway production of the Pajama Game. She also starred in the film and was the sexy babe in the Steam Heat number.

She hurt her leg one night on Broadway and her understudy took her part. Unfortunately for Carol, a casting director picked that night to watch the show and immediately hired the understudy instead of her... Shirley MacLean, who went on the great success in movies. Carol and Shirley were kind of look-alikes.. both with "gamin" faces and bodies.

However, as I said, Carol was able to do the film version of the Broadway musical in 1957, and is still remembered fondly for the role. (Order it from NETFLIX and check it out!) Around this time, she found out that she had diabetes and her health began to deteriorate. She died of pneumonia in 1964, probably somehow related to the diabetes. She was only 39 years old.
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