Beloved Monett dance instructor remembered

By Sheila Harris Special to the Monett Monthly

Mary Beck, of Cassville, passed away on October 6, at age 96, leaving behind her a legacy of light feet and tapping toes in southwest Missouri.

Beck will ever be remembered as the lady who, for 63 years, taught the art of dance to generations of students. She was 91 years old when she opted to permanently close Mary Beck School of Dance in Monett, in 2020, due to COVID. The school had been open since 1961.

Kay Kaiser, of Monett, remembers that year well. She was 5 years old, and one of Mary Beck’s first students.

“I wanted to take piano lessons when I was little, but our house wasn’t big enough for a piano, so mom convinced me to take dance lessons instead,” Kaiser said.

Kaiser was hooked. She took dance lessons from Beck throughout all of her school years in Monett, then became an instructor for Beck when she returned home after college and a brief working stint in another area.

Kaiser’s mother, Norma, was instrumental in convincing Beck to open the dance studio in Monett in 1961, in addition to Beck’s studio in Neosho, where Beck had taught dance since 1957.

“Mary told Mom that if she could come up with enough interested students, she’d be willing to open a Monett studio,” Kaiser said. “So, Mom and several of her friends began canvassing the Monett area for students. I think there were 14 of us in our first Monett class.”

Beck’s students loved her.

“In no time, Mary was averaging about 130 students a year in Monett,” Kaiser said.

According to her son, Greg Beck, of Cassville, his mother (then Mary Thomas) began taking dance lessons as a young girl in Joplin, where she and her mother had moved after Mary’s father’s death when she was two years old.

“When Mom got older – maybe high school age – her instructor paid her and some of the other older students to help her,” Beck said. “I think they made something like $1 or $1.50 a day. I think Mom paid her own instructors a little more than that.”

Mary and the love of her life, Bill Beck, were wed in Bentonville, Ark., in 1949, and the couple settled into a house in Cassville. There, according to Greg Beck, Mary began teaching dance students in her home — 10 at a time — until she purchased the Neosho dance studio in 1957.

In Neosho, she inscribed what could rightfully be called her motto on one of the studio’s walls: “If the music is good, you dance.”

“Mom had 80 students when she started teaching in Neosho,” Beck said. “But, before long, she had 120.”

Mary Beck continued the hectic pace of maintaining instruction in both the Neosho and Monett studios for 15 years, “a lot longer than she meant to,” Greg Beck said.

According to Kaiser, Mary Beck’s first studio in Monett was in a long-gone building on the corner of Sixth Street and Broadway.

“We had to walk up a steep flight of rickety stairs to get to the studio on the second floor,” Kaiser said. “At first, we didn’t have dedicated studio space, so we’d arrive for class and have to clear the floor of folding chairs and overflowing ash trays after the room had been used by a local men’s club.”

When the dancers finally had dedicated dance space, the building, in all of its antiquated glory, began to lean, Kaiser said.

“The owners put cables around the outside of the building to try to stabilize it,” Kaiser said. “But, I guess they didn’t help much. The city ended up condemning it.”

Kaiser said Beck scrambled to find new quarters.

“We met here and there for a while, until Mary found the building on 7th Street [south of Broadway],” Kaiser said. “Mary taught ballet, tap and jazz dance. She loved the Bob Fosse style of jazz: the Broadway show tunes.”

Every year, Kaiser said, Mary Beck would take students to Dance Masters of America (DMA) competitions in Oklahoma: where, at different times of the year, there were contests in “Solo Dance,” “Groups and Lines” and “Mr. Dance.”

“There were always more female dancers than male, except for one year — maybe in the late 70s — when she had her first all-male class,” Kaiser said.

As an instructor for Beck, Kaiser said that she’d often have mothers ask her if she thought their child had a future in dance. She said she always told them, “That’s not what dance instruction is about.”

Kaiser said there are more benefits to dance lessons than becoming a professional dancer.

“Mary taught us grace and poise and confidence, whether it was on a stage or during a job interview,” Kaiser said.

According to Kaiser, some of Mary’s students, however, did pursue and achieve successful professional careers in dance.

One former student performed in Las Vegas for a time, and now teaches dance at a performing arts center in Columbia. Another, said Kaiser, started a dance studio in Charlotte, N.C., which has an average enrollment of 1,600 students.

Kaiser said Mary Beck and her family have always felt like her own family.

“Mary was like my second mother,” said Kaiser, whose mother Norma passed away two years ago.

Greg Beck said, as a young boy, he picked up a love for music from his mother. He formed his own band in high school, then later served as the drummer for a traveling band based in Omaha.

Back home in Cassville, Beck was instrumental in organizing, directing and playing drums for the long-running annual gala musical production, The Show, which began in 1992.

Mary Beck was its staunchest supporter.

“Mom came to every performance – Thursday, Saturday and Sunday — every year, for the past 33 years, except for 2020, when The Show was cancelled, due to Covid,” said Greg Beck.

Some of Mary Beck’s dance students performed in The Show, from time to time, Greg Beck said.

When Beck was diagnosed with congestive heart failure a few weeks before her death, Kay Kaiser and other former students hurried to her side, for one more visit.

Greg Beck said his mother also received a call from a former student, who asked if she could bring her young daughter over to meet her.

“The daughter had seen Mary’s inscribed motto on the wall of her former dance studio in Neosho (which had been reopened by another of Mary’s former students), and was so inspired by it, that she told her mother she’d like to meet the lady who had written it,” Beck said. “The young lady is the third generation to take dance lessons in her family. Both her mother and grandmother had taken lessons from Mary Beck.”

The evening after Mary Beck’s passing, Greg Beck went to rehearsal for The Show, which was scheduled for presentation the last weekend in October.

“It’s what Mom would have wanted,” said Beck, for whom music is therapy.

“She apologized for getting sick right before The Show, and told me she’d be better and well enough to attend by then,” Beck said.

Mary Beck was unable to make it, but she was no doubt at The Show with her son in spirit: the same spirit that prompted her to tell him before her passing, “If my kids want to dance [at my Celebration of Life service], let them dance.”

Chances are, they will.

That service will take place at the Family Life Center in Cassville on Nov. 8, from 2-4 p.m.