In Step With Music and Each Other for 70 Years

Jo and Al Lauder’s first date was a dance after a football game in a small New Jersey town. Nervous about being with such a pretty young thing, Al tried his best to pull some smooth moves.

“Oh my,” Jo thought, “this man can’t dance.”

They started taking dance classes and about a year later made their partnership a permanent arrangement. They’ve been dancing ever since, through nearly 70 years of marriage.

Jo, who leads in conversation (but won’t tell you her age), is still taken with 95-year-old Al: “He’s very handsome. He has a full head of white hair, he’s got all his teeth and he takes no medication.”

This morning, Al will leave his traditional Valentine’s Day love note for Jo to find on her side of the table in the morning at their Arcadia home. If they do go out, it’ll be a quiet date at the Capistrano restaurant nearby.

As many as three times a week, the couple dance at the Arcadia Community Center. There, surrounded by friends, they do a little fox trot, a little polka, even some Latin dancing.

They’re still a dashing pair when they step onto the dance floor. Wearing a silver bolo tie inlaid with an image of a twirling couple, the debonair Al gently takes his wife’s hand. He has some trouble hearing the music, but together they follow a synchronized memory of steps.

“She’s the only one that knows my steps,” Al said. “She feels good.”

Jo giggled at that with girlish embarrassment. “We’ve been doing it so long, it’s part of our nature.”

Over the years, they’ve taught dancing at their church and belonged to dozens of dancing clubs, only to see age take its toll on membership. The joy of uninhibitedly hoofing it on a dance floor with friends has faded. “These days there’s too much of this getting up and rattling your bones around,” said their daughter, Aline Lauzon, 66, of Florida.

Dancing was required of anyone who grew up in the Lauder household in New Jersey, Lauzon recalled. New dance steps became a family pastime in the living room, and there was always music playing.

“When I was 4 or 5, Mom would brush my hair on Saturday,” Lauzon said, lost in thought. “She’d sit me down to curl it and dry it . . . with an opera on the radio . . . with the sun streaming through the window. . . .”

Al, who spent his working years as a postmaster, and Jo, who was a secretary, complement each other. She’s chatty and he’s bookish. He says it was love at first sight and she says he just needed a girl. She repeats other people’s conversations to him because he can read her lips. She likes decorating in spicy oranges and pinks, while he still does the income taxes.

“Once she wanted to crochet this jacket,” Lauzon said. “He sat and cut up all these strips for her so she could sit and crochet it.”

Times were bad when Jo and Al got married in New Jersey in 1932 during the Depression. Jo doesn’t like talking about those years. She also doesn’t like the fact that so many couples divorce when times are tough. Divorce is not a solution, she said, it’s just jumping into another problem. Sure, she and Al struggled sometimes, but they worked together.

On their golden wedding anniversary in 1982, the entire family threw a party, and one relative presented Al and Jo with a bronze statue of them dancing.

In June 1999, Jo suffered a heart attack and passed out on the dance floor. Al stayed by her bedside until Lauzon flew out after hearing the distress in her father’s voice.

“He said, ‘What a terrible thing to happen to such a young girl,’ ” the daughter recalled. “He thinks she’s beautiful and, truly, isn’t that something?”

Last year, another accident threatened to take Jo off the dance floor when she broke her toe in a bad fall from her bed. But the couple took it in stride.

“I just went to the dance in my open-toe special silver shoes,” Jo said.

Al smiled at the memory.

“We’re both young and crazy,” he said. “All we do is dance.”