In the end, it’s not the accomplishment that is remembered. It’s the spark, the smile, the essence of a person.
In decades of running the Betty Spooner Creative Arts Foundation Studio, Mike Jordan headed the second oldest dance academy in Washington. Generations of children took tap, ballet and jazz dancing at the Everett school.
Betty Grandy didn’t dance there, though her daughter took lessons from Jordan’s mother, the academy founder who gave it her name.
At 86, Grandy remembers what everyone seems to know about Jordan – not his school or dance moves, but that delightfully childlike smile.
“He was outgoing and upbeat. Being around him, you couldn’t help but feel good,” said Grandy. She knew Jordan back in the early 1950s when he worked as a “morning boy” at her Spudnut Shop on Colby Avenue.
“He kept in touch after all those years,” said Grandy, who’s now living in Silverdale.
Jordan died May 6 at 69. Grandy is just one of many “Friends of Mike Jordan” making donations so a permanent remembrance of the danceman will be placed in downtown Everett.
A committee, headed by Jordan’s longtime friends and community leaders Ed and Betty Morrow, is working to raise $50,000 to commission a life-size bronze sculpture of the dancer. The Everett Cultural Commission has approved the project, and the art would be owned by the city, Betty Morrow said.
ArtsUnited, a nonprofit corporation supporting the arts in Snohomish County, is allowing the group to use the nonprofit so donations will be tax-deductible. The arts organization is headed by Frank McCord, Cascade Bank chairman.
Also on the sculpture committee are Idamae Schack, Jerry Wynne, Diane Rogers and Judy Tuohy.
Sculptors being considered are Kevin Petelle, of Northwest Artworks foundry in Sultan, who has artwork at the Providence Everett Pavilion for Women and Children; and Robert McDermott, creator of a bronze “Dirty Dan” Harris, founder of the town of Fairhaven, now part of Bellingham.
If you ever encountered Jordan’s joie de vivre, you can almost see him in bronze, in what Betty Morrow expects “will be a friendly piece.”
“We’re hoping for some way people could interact with it, sitting with him on a bench or some such thing,” she said.
“We’re sending out pleas to all dancers, past, present and way past, who were with Betty Spooner’s,” she added. Morrow favors the Everett Performing Arts Center, where Jordan staged his students’ dance programs, as a site.
Everett City Council member Brenda Stonecipher took dance lessons from Jordan as a girl. She grew up to see her daughter Bailey, 10, do the same.
Her favorite memory of Jordan is recent, from last year’s Christmas program.
“There were two little kids who would not go onstage. They were probably 4 or 5. They were crying backstage and wouldn’t go on,” Stonecipher said. “So out on stage came Mike, his head held high, with these two little-bitty kids. They went out and did this basic dance.”
True to form. And if I were a sculptor …
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@ heraldnet.com.
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