Ballet Teacher Gets a Lot of Help for Her Encore

First Lucille McClure’s ballet school crumbled. Then her health crumbled. And then she found out who her friends were.

The Whittier building that housed McClure’s school was damaged so badly by the Oct. 1 earthquake that it had to be razed.

McClure, 67, a venerable figure in the cloistered world of ballet instruction, moved her school into a 64-foot-long wooden trailer in a parking lot behind the demolished building, but soon the shock and anxiety caught up with her. She found herself in the intensive-care ward of a hospital, suffering from a virus and internal bleeding, and telephoning her minister to ask for communion.

She had no staff, no business associates and no family. She lived alone with her four cats in a house a few blocks away from her school. She didn’t know how to drive. Dancing had been her life and her sole sustenance. Now, it seemed, she was about to lose both.

Yet two weeks later, McClure was sitting up in her living room, talking about resuming her daily dance exercises and returning to the classroom sometime after Thanksgiving.

Pupils Pitch In

Her school, meanwhile, has scarcely missed a beat. In McClure’s absence, several of her long-time pupils pitched in to teach, balance the books and keep track of the myriad details involved in doing business in a part of the city that still occasionally looks like a war zone, a place where shops hang signs that say, “Open and Safe.”

There was Betty Hazard, a Hacienda Heights math teacher who began taking tap-dancing classes from McClure 15 years ago and has spent the better part of the seven weeks since the quake staying at McClure’s home--first to quell McClure’s post-quake fears of being alone and then, after McClure went home from the hospital, to monitor her recovery.

There was Susan Gilbert, who has taken classes at McClure’s school for the last eight years and, while on maternity leave from her job, has taught a dozen ballet classes a week.

And there was Lark Frieze, a legal secretary who has studied ballet under McClure for 25 years, ever since she was 5 years old.

Frieze’s life was already complicated. Normally a school teacher, she took the secretarial job this term to give her time to prepare for the arrival of an adopted child from Brazil. But when McClure asked her to help the school keep going by taking over another dozen classes a week, she agreed.

“I’d gone see her the morning after the earthquake, and she said, ‘If I can’t teach, I die,’ ” Frieze said. “And I remember thinking, oh gosh, she means that. It’s not like she can go pick up and do something else. I knew if I didn’t help her keep the classes going no one else really would.”

Asked for Donations

Soon after the earthquake Frieze and Hazard sent letters to the homes of the 116 people currently enrolled in McClure’s school, asking for donations.

“Miss McClure wasn’t thrilled about that,” Frieze said. “She’s really a proud person. She didn’t want people to feel like they had to give extra.”

Lucille McClure says she is grateful for the help, but knew all along that she would find a way to keep the school going. She teaches by the Cecchetti method, a disciplined system of ballet instruction with grade levels and class manuals. If she had been desperate enough, she said, she could have recruited even her pre-teen students to temporarily run the classes by following the syllabus.

The ballet is equal parts agonizing persistence and artistic obsession. So, in her own way, is McClure, who still must decide whether she wants to rent new, permanent quarters. “There’s no way I can ever retire,” she said. “I have no other source of income, and it’s the thing I love the most, anyway. The only thing I ever wanted to do was dance.”

She taught at the National Ballet School in Toronto, Canada, before coming to Whittier in 1961. She taught at another school before opening her own, leasing space in the now-vanished building on Philadelphia Street 19 years ago.

An Institution

She became something of an institution in a city that relishes its small-town flavor. Girls studied, left, became mothers and enrolled their daughters.

“I think everybody in Whittier knows me,” she boasted. “I’ve either taught their child or aunt or grandchild.”

The legacy is eroding, however. Little girls do not continue to study the ballet for as many years as they used to. There are too many other things to do--piano, tennis, soccer--and too many parents who want to involve their children in many things.

“They don’t seem to keep them at anything for any length of time,” the teacher said. “I think they’re cheating them. It’s very distressing to me.”

Indomitable Nature

Betty Hazard, who met McClure when her daughter was taking ballet classes, understands how the new transiency grates on McClure’s indomitable nature.

“As far as I know, she has never missed a class,” Hazard said. “Once when they were putting in brick in the streets in Uptown (Whittier’s redeveloped commercial district) she slipped and broke her back. She taught that day. Heating pad, pain pills. She’s one of the most dedicated people I’ve known.”