From: Erin Stevens, California
When Steven Mitchell and I were on our search for Frankie, I found his home number at the Pasadena Public Library, after seeing his name in an old Life Magazine. When he answered the phone I asked him, 'Are you Frankie Manning the swing dancer?'
He answered by saying, 'No, this is Frankie Manning the Postal Worker.'
'But, didn’t you used to swing dance?' I said.
So we kind of had a funny rapport at the beginning. Eventually, I asked him if he would teach us if we came to New York. He said he wouldn’t do any teaching, but he agreed to meet with us, and that was enough for Steven and I to fly over as fast as we could.
When we finally met he watched us dance, and eventually agreed to teach us. So Frankie came to pick us up in his car, and he drove us out to his apartment. When we got there he said “well, let’s see what you can do.”
Steven and I put in our cassette tape of Sing, Sing, Sing and proceeded to start swinging and doing our aerials on his living room carpet. He immediately popped out the tape and put in Count Basie’s Shiny Stockings and said 'what can you do to this?'
Steven and I didn’t know what to do, so we just said 'Huh?'
It was a whole new way to look at the dance. He didn’t really know how to give us the counts and the steps, but he could give us the feeling that he gave to the dance. That was enough to alter it forever to me. The way I looked at it, the way I danced it, and the way I taught it would be forever changed.
After standing in Frankie’s living room, looking at his photo albums, brochures, pictures on his wall and seeing all the things that he had accomplished, I knew that I was going to dedicate my life to spreading the word of the Lindy Hop. He changed my life that day.
People give us credit for rediscovering Frankie and bringing him out of retirement, but who would have thought that a couple of kids from Pasadena that went to New York in search of Frankie Manning would become what it is today.
He called me after he won his Tony Award to thank me, and that meant a whole lot to me. Sometimes when he and I are at Swing Camp Catalina, we look at each other standing over a sea of dancers moving across the dance floor and say, 'did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine that we would be standing here together looking at this kind of a crowd?' We would just shake our heads at each other and think that there was no way anyone could have ever foreseen that Frankie would be out there again, having this full second life touring, teaching, and performing the Lindy Hop.
It’s remarkable... It’s incredible... It’s wonderful...
It couldn’t have happened to a better person.