Dixie Roberts

Dixie Roberts was a vaudeville tap and specialty dancer, who also danced in chorus lines and performed musical comedy. A featured dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, she was often billed as the dancer who "taps with a Southern accent", although she was born in Elmhurst, New York. She explained her moniker, saying that she was conceived in her mother's hometown of Atlanta. Roberts grew up on Long Island and also in upstate New York, where she learned to dance and became an accomplished athlete before her years of touring the U.S. as an entertainer.

Roberts was born April 5, 1919, in Elmhurst, NY.

Roberts took dancing lessons from Dorothy Fitch in Peekskill, New York, while she attended Carmel High School. She taught dance after school, charging 25 cents an hour, often walking the five miles home after she finished teaching.

A professional dancer at age 16, Roberts' first job was at the Paramount Theatre in New York, dancing with the Tommy Dorsey Band in 1935. She and her partner were one of the five acts on the bill with the band. She danced with Horace Nichols, with whom she had earlier won the title, "King and Queen of Shag" at the Paramount Theatre, N.Y.

Roberts was also a prizewinning athlete, New York State Cue Champion, and expert riflewoman. An A.A.U. swimming champ, Roberts was invited to train for the Olympic swim team, an offer her father did not let her accept. In 1943, Physical Culture magazine reported that, as a youngster in upstate New York, Roberts was "the best feminine baseball player in the county, and was hard to beat at tennis, basketball and swimming". Similarly, the Sunday Mirror reported that 22-year-old Roberts, "once had a run of 93 in three cushion billiards, bowls a neat 200 and finished last season batting .405 ... and has the trophies to prove it ... She has won 11 plaques for excellence in sports since she's been in show business, and her accomplishments range from swimming and track to stud poker. There's a popular belief that men don't like athletic girls, but Dixie belies it. She's probably the most popular dame in the show, in a cast of 50 expensive stunners."

In 1939, at age 20, Roberts taught and performed on weekends at Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel, which was the inspiration for "Kellerman’s Resort" in the movie Dirty Dancing.

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