New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Before ‘Dancing with the Stars’
Ballroom dancer extraordinaire Gunnar Johnson on a life well-lived
To recall the sheer exhilaration of sweeping his wife across the stage to the Viennese waltz, Gunnar Johnson only has to look at a framed picture on his wall.
“It was positively heart-banging,” Johnson, 91, recalled on a recent afternoon at his sunlit, apartment at The Village at Mariner’s Point in East Haven.
No, they weren’t gliding under the chandeliers on the third-floor studio of Madison’s Monroe (now Walker Loden) building at the Gunnar Johnson Select School of Dancing. There, he and, Eileen, who died in January 2013, schooled countless Shoreline couples on the intricacies of the waltz, foxtrot, and tango, among other dances.
Nor were they circling the dance floor at the Mercy Center, where the Johnsons’ New Year’s Eve dinner dance was an event as anticipated as the Fourth of July, and the monthly dances were staples in the town’s social calendar, according to Johnson’s close friend and bookkeeper Karen Kelly, a long-time Madison resident.
“Even before I knew Gunnar and Eileen, you’d always hear about their dances,” she said.
No, this was the 1959 Harvest Moon Ball, the premier dancing competition in New York City at the height of the ballroom dancing craze. This was a star-studded affair, with a crowd of 18,000 packing every inch of Madison Square Garden on a Friday night. This was, it seemed, the epicenter of New York City, of everything.
“All you could see was the spotlights and flash bulbs going off and it felt like my hair was standing on end,” said the nattily attired Johnson, as he regarded the picture. “That was a thrill of a lifetime.”
He and Eileen had met at a dance in East Haven in 1951. Johnson was home on furlough from the Army and had 48 hours before he would ship to Korea. He spied a dark-haired, darkeyed young woman sitting with her friends across the dance floor. He crossed the dance floor. He asked her to dance. That was
“I ended up dancing with her all night, and we got together the next night to dance too, and I thought to myself ‘I’m not going to let go of this gal,’” he recalled.
Over the next year, Johnson served as a tank driver in an armored division in Korea. He and Eileen wrote letters to each other. He came home with a Bronze Star. It was, it seemed, as if they’d never parted. They danced at clubs, at halls, at parties. They took lessons, first locally, then in Bridgeport.
“We weren’t going to go much further than that, but we got into it and the instructor said ‘you guys have a lot on the ball, you should try out for this Harvest Moon Ball, which was held once a year in New York City,” Johnson said.
“I guess if you have the right partner, it just works.”
Soon, they were driving back and forth to New York for weekend competitions and rigorous lessons on the waltz, foxtrot, tango, and rumba with the renowned instructors Camille Barbara and John Lucchese, as well as more specialized training in disciplines such as acrobatics. Each night they could be found in local church basements, practicing their routines and going over new combinations and steps.
On the night of the finals at Madison Square Garden, Johnson said, “we booked quite a few rooms for our friends and they all stayed overnight.” Those friends were on hand to see the pair walk away with the top award in the waltz division, and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
One Sunday, not long after they moved to Madison, the two were driving through town. “The light was red, and we were looking around and we saw a building, and we said ‘holy smokes, look at that,’” Johnson recalled.
It was the Monroe Building on Main Street, built in 1911 as a Masonic Lodge in the Beaux-Arts style. They soon rented its upper level, transforming the space into a dance studio. Johnson worked as a sales representative at Madison Realty on the first floor. Eventually they bought the building, which now houses Walker Loden.
On weekday evenings, they offered private and group lessons. “It was great, we had gangs of fun, and we met some wonderful people who became lifelong friends,” Johnson said, naming Dick and Pat Gedney, and Bob and Lauri Sturwold, among others.
On Saturday nights, there were dances at the Mercy Center. The two still competed on occasion, but they could be more selective, Johnson said. Summers they worked on cruise ships headed to Bermuda, where they taught in the afternoon and performed in the evenings.
On one of those performances, Johnson recalled, he tossed Eileen into the air just as the ship lurched, tearing his rotator cuff. “But I caught her,” he said, grinning.
All the while, the two were quietly improving their town. As Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club members, he and Eileen were responsible for the town clock, the information kiosk, and the flower boxes perched atop Madison’s trash receptacles, as well as the Antique Show on the Green, among other events.
“The two made Madison a place, they gave it a spirit, just by the act of having created a glittering ballroom on the top floor of a building across Main Street from the post office,” one Madison resident wrote in a tribute in the midst of plans for a memorial fountain at Tuxis Pond in Eileen’s honor.
At one point, Johnson, surrounded by pictures of him and Eileen dancing across the decades, paused.
“There’s really nothing like it, being able to bring joy to people,” he said, a catch in his voice. “If you have the right partner, you can do anything.”