Peg Leg Bates - The First One-legged Dance Star

Everyone's talking about Heather Mills' appearance on this new season of the hit television show, "Dancing with the Stars", but she's not the first dancer to make a splash with only one leg.

From the 1920s to the 1970s, Edward Helmore Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates was one of tap dance's great superstars, appearing in vaudeville, Broadway, and television.

His story began at age 12. While working at a South Carolina cotton-seed gin mill, his left leg was caught in a conveyor belt and mangled. Because there was no hospital nearby that admitted and treated black people, Bates had to have his leg amputated on his mother's kitchen table.

But, nothing could stop Clayton Bates from dancing, the love of his life. At first, he began to dance while balanced on two broomsticks. Then his uncle made a wooden peg leg for him. Bates practiced and practiced all the tap dance steps that he'd ever seen.

In Greenville, South Carolina, he made money for his family dancing at local carnivals and county fairs. His show-stopper move was a five-foot leap into the air. In 1927, he was discovered in Greenville by Broadway producer Lew Leslie. In 1928, Peg Leg Bates went to New York to appear in the hit Broadway show "Blackbirds of 1928" where he danced with the legendary Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

From that time on, Peg Leg became a staple on the vaudeville circuit. In the segregated South, Bates had to perform in black minstrel paint to fool the audiences into thinking he was a white man.

Peg Leg Bates' most popular routine was "the jet plane" where he'd run halfway across the stage, leap high into the air, and land on his peg leg. At his prime, he could leap almost six feet in the air.

In 1938, he met influential New York entertainment columnist Ed Sullivan, beginning a long friendship. In the 1950s, he appeared 22 times on Sullivan's hit television variety show "The Toast of the Town."

He kept thirteen peg legs in his dressing room, one leg to match each of his thirteen suits.

In 1951, he opened the Peg Leg Bates Country Club, the one and only Catskills resort for a black clientele. For forty years he performed at the resort's nightclub and greeted guests. In 1987, he sold the resort after his wife died.

In 1998 Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates died at age 91 while performing at a fundraiser to erect a life-sized statue in Fountain Inn, South Carolina, the place of his birth.
His standard performance closing speech was "You have made a certain one-legged dancer very very happy. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you."

SOURCES:

"Peg Leg Bates", Constance Valis Hills, Tap Dance Hall of Fame, URL: (http://www.atdf.org/awards/pegleg.html)
http://www.fountain-inn.com/visitors/history.htm
"Obituary: Peg Leg Bates", Edward Helmore, London Guardian, URL: (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19981211/ai_n14202365)
http://www.answers.com/topic/peg-leg-bates
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1705003/bio
"Dance and Give Back, Clayton Bates", Dr. Phebe Davidson, African American Registry, URL: (http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2129/Dance_and_give_back_Clayton_Bates )