Fay Gleeson has been running a Fort William dance studio since 1958, placing her among both the youngest and oldest dance studio owners in Canadian history.
Most people who open a dance studio last a few seasons; a few manage a decade or two. Fay Gleeson Steadwell took over a Fort William studio in 1958, while a Grade 10 student at Fort William Collegiate Institute, and taught her regular adult class this morning at 222 Leith Street. Counting its two previous owners, the studio dates to 1941, the third-oldest continuously operating private dance studio in Canada after Montréal’s Cameron School of Dance (1930) and Kelowna’s Canadian School of Ballet (1938).
Ask her how that happened and she laughs. None of it was the plan.
The story begins with Gladys Hartley (1921–2009), a Winnipeg girl who by sixteen was dancing with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. She met her husband Vic in the tumbling classes at the Winnipeg YMCA, and the two built an adagio act around aerial lifts. Vic’s job with Dun & Bradstreet brought them to Fort William in 1941, and Gladys opened a studio at the West Fort Community Centre. One of her youngest pupils was three-year-old Fay Gleeson.
The Gleesons were already a performing family. Fay was one of the “Five Gleesons,” with her older brothers Rod, Gary and Dan and younger sister Bryer, and the Hartleys, close friends of her parents, pulled the children into their act. They tumbled at the YMCA Santa Claus show, at City Hall, and at festivals from Fort Frances to Grand Marais. “It was dangerous,” Miss Fay says. “My brother fell on his head and broke his back.” That was Gary, “always the clown.” After this incident, with shows still booked, their father put on the clown suit and filled in! Lorne Gleeson was a fifty-year-old Kellogg’s salesman. “People really laughed. He did really well.” Her mother, Zilpha “Zip” Gleeson, taught school at Central and McKellar.
In 1952 Dun & Bradstreet promoted Vic to Vancouver, and Gladys went with him. (She went on to coach the Flicka Gymnastics Club and enter the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.) She left the studio to a former pupil, Rhodella Achtenberg (1936–2017), who had also trained under the tap teacher Sylvia Horn (1914–2005) and now taught out of the old YMCA. Rhodella then married Gary Gleeson, the brother with the broken back, and when Gary left in 1958 to study chiropractic in Toronto, she left town as well.
For the second time, a woman followed her husband out of town. And this time, Rhodella chose to leave her fledgling studio to Gary’s little sister, Fay.
“I was planning to be a phys-ed teacher in high school,” Miss Fay says. “But the mothers of these students asked me if I would take the studio for one year. I said, okay, I’ll do that for one year. And here we are [68 years later].”
She inherited about ninety students paying three dollars and fifty cents a month, roughly $40,000 a year in today’s money, and ran the business after school and on Saturdays while finishing Grade 10.
Her first recital, at First Church United (1926–2010) on the corner of Brock and Kingsway, nearly ended the career on the spot. The piano player fell ill the night of the rehearsal, and there were no cassettes then. “Guess what I did: I sang the whole rehearsal. And I thought, okay, maybe this is a sign telling me this is not my thing.” On show night a strap on her costume broke midway through her own acrobatic number. She lived a block away, ran home for a bodysuit, and came back to finish. “We had lots of laughs, and then carried on. That was my starting year.”
After a final year of “special commercial” at high school, she took a day job at eighteen in the City Hall planning department under Dave Thompson (1888–1959), and taught dance at night. She and a girlfriend worked side by side there for three years, and the office nicknamed the pair “the Gold Dust Twins.” In 1962, at twenty-one, she married her high-school sweetheart, Rob Steadwell (1940–2023), and City Hall dismissed her, as it dismissed every woman who married in those years. “If you got married, that was the end of it.” Nobody could dismiss her from her own studio, so she kept teaching.
She offered to rename it the “Fay Steadwell Dance Centre”. “I suggested it, and he would have no part of it.” It was a good call; “Fay Gleeson” has “glee”. Rob, nicknamed “Mr. Fix-It” around the studio, was shy where his wife was outgoing. For sixty years he painted the sets, did the renovations and worked backstage at every recital. He appeared on stage exactly once: a show started while he was still up a ladder fixing something, and the only way off was straight across the stage, ladder in hand, in full view of the audience. “I could never have done it without him.”
Each summer she went to Toronto and New York for Dance Educators of America courses, often with fellow studio owner Anna Pozihun (1929–2006), and fit the travel around raising five children.
For twenty-five years the studio was wherever she could rent a floor: the YMCA, the gyms at Agnew Johnson and Redwood, the Vale Community Centre, the college fitness centre by the bubble, and for a stretch the nine-foot basement of her own house in Northwood, built that tall so she could teach in it. Hauling record players from gym to gym wore thin. Around 1984 she bought 222 Leith Street, a century-old former church by then hosting stag parties and bingo. “The guy who brought us said, ‘Don’t look at the mess, just think what you could do with it.’” Under the grime was a hardwood floor more than a hundred years old; Sylvia Horn had taught tap on it. Her dancers still use it. She mortgaged the building and spent six months making it a studio.
During the 2020 COVID pandemic, owning her own building was crucial to the studio’s survival. “Good thing I had the building by that time. I was lucky I didn’t have a mortgage.” They marked the floor into squares, capped classes at ten and taught on video. Enrolment dropped and hasn’t fully come back.
The older Lakehead teachers specialized. Amelia Jackson (1904–1990) of the Dance Centre of Northwestern Ontario did ballet; Sylvia Horn did tap; Ethel Markall did baton. “Guess what, we specialized in all of them.” Her competitive dancers still sit exams in tap, jazz and ballet. Some teachers from the earlier era were “very strict; I would never have taken dancing, too strict for me.” Her own rule is simpler:
“It’s always the kids first.” Her niece Cindy Kennedy, Rhodella’s daughter, now runs the competitive side. “Sometimes the winner is not always the best, and that’s the thing we don’t stress,” Cindy says. “It gives some of these kids the confidence to get up and give speeches, which they never would have done before.”
All fourteen teachers on staff started here as students. Miss Fay teaches the morning adult classes, Pilates, Zumba and TRX: the phys-ed career she once planned, arrived at the long way around. Some of her ladies have been with her thirty years.
She plans to teach at least through her seventieth season, which ends in April 2028. “People always say to me, ‘I don’t know how you did it for all those years,’ and I say, the teachers, the dancers, and the parents, they’re the best.”
“It doesn’t feel like it. It’s old hat for me now,” she says. “But when I look back, I think, holy cow.”