Waltz Through Time

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By Jim Waltzer

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 23, 2005

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Dancing Master�Made His Mark in AC

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It was a turkey farm when a middle-aged dancer with an artificial leg purchased these seven acres in the Catskill Mountains in 1952. Brawny and gruffly sweet, his talent exceeded only by his will, there was nothing artificial about this man who was ahead of his time much the same way he always anticipated the beat. To the disappointment of its owner, the Peg Leg Bates Country Club failed to integrate the Borscht Belt, but it did provide a final showcase for an entertainment legend and his stories.

And man, did he have stories to tell.

Like the time he danced all day for the wounded soldiers at Atlantic City's Thomas England General Hospital, Haddon Hall's alter ego during the World War II years. He was in town for a gig at the Paradise Club when Army officials asked if he could give the guys a few minutes. He gave them five hours, dancing in every ward to the keyboard accompaniment of a man named Count Basie. The dancer had at least one crucial thing in common with his audience - some of the vets likewise were missing limbs.

Like the times he danced at the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the Cotton Club in Harlem and for the king and queen of England. Or the days when minstrel shows closed prematurely and left him stranded and, long before that, the afternoons when he danced - barefoot and five years old - for pennies in the town barbershop.

Or that black night when he lost his leg. Well, that was one story he didn't like to tell. Alibis were not part of his routine. "Don't judge me as a one-legged dancer," he said. "Judge me as a dancer."

Clayton Bates was born to sharecroppers in Fountain Inn, South Carolina in 1907, and indeed, he could virtually dance before he could walk. Another war - World War I - thinned out the male population in the region and a 12-year-old Clayton pitched in at the local cotton mill, whose crop was converted to oil needed by the military. In the dim light of the graveyard shift, the young man's leg was mangled by a threshing machine. Instead of a hospital, which was not hospitable to blacks in the rural South of 1919, Clayton was taken home for an amputation on the kitchen table. His left leg was gone from eight inches below the knee; the accident also had claimed two fingers.

But Clayton Bates was born to dance, and he would dance again. His uncle hammered out the boy's first peg leg, and a teenage Clayton was soon walking to school, building his strength and adjusting his coordination. The road beckoned, and one of those times when he was hitchhiking between jobs, he hailed the private bus of Eddie Lemon and the "Dashing Dinah Revue." The troupe was headed north to the big cities and Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates soon found himself on Broadway with Lew Leslie's famous Blackbirds. His world had changed in a hurry.

Onstage, Peg Leg exhibited courage, athleticism, and personality. The leather butt of his peg made a sound that complemented the clack of his shoe's metal tap, and his physical on-the-edge style was high drama. His outrageous "Jet Plane" punctuated many a performance, as he leaped above the stage and landed on his peg leg, then hopped backward, the band wailing all the while. He was a showstopper ... literally, the night at the Paradise when his peg leg wedged in a hole in the wood. "I've gone through floors all over the world," he said.

Indeed, he joined Louis Armstrong for a tour in Australia, and Basie once more at Radio City Music Hall. He captured Atlantic City's Club Harlem crowd with his dancing gymnastics, and became the first black to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show en route to 22 guest spots on the then Sunday night TV staple, the last one at age 60. He was always immaculately tailored and engaged a New York designer to make his peg legs in different colors. For swankiness, he wore top hat and tails. In character, though, he could be less sartorial but quite convincing as the likes of peg-leg pirate Long John Silver. Perfect casting.

Speaking and dancing onstage in the showroom, or roaming the grounds by day in a golf cart, Peg Leg was a formidable presence at his country club. In later years, twin hip replacements slowed him down but they were easy compared to what he'd been through. He performed into his 90s, a potent blend of artificial parts and genuine heart. His daughter, Melodye, said that almost to the day he died in 1998 near the South Carolina site of that long-ago fateful accident, he did his daily morning exercises. As Gene Kelly once shouted, memorably, on-screen, "Gotta dance."