Virginia Drumm isn't skipping a beat at 90

She is still light on her feet and sharing her love of dancing

By Barbara Sherman

The Regal Courier, Nov 25, 2009

Barbara Sherman / Regal Courier

A LIFE WELL LIVED — Virginia Drumm looks at photographs taken over a lifetime that started in West Virginia and includes four children, 14 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

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Virginia Harding Drumm has been dancing her whole life and passed on her love of it to her four daughters and many of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The Summerfield resident turned 90 in November, and her daughter Carla Webber noted, "Virginia still kicks up her heels and loves to dance."

Virginia, who grew up in Wheeling, W. Va. (which boasts the third-largest suspension bridge in the world), attributes the start of her love for dance to her dad, who played in an orchestra and was a performer.

"He took me to my first dance class, and when I was there, I could do everything - forward rolls, back-bends, cartwheels, chest-rolls and back-walkovers," she said. "They couldn't believe it. I went to bed that night and thought, 'How did I know all that?' It was because after dinner my dad would play with us and taught us all that. He did all those tricks with my sister and me."

Virginia, who had a younger sister and two younger brothers, had an impish side even as a child, recalling one time, "My dad made my sister and me write 100 times, 'I must obey my father and mother.'

"My sister carefully wrote out her punishment. I started out writing carefully and did one full page. When I turned the page over, I wrote out the top line and then dittoed the rest of the page. I did this on each consecutive page until I had completed 100 times via dittos. My dad didn't say a word."

Decades later, when Virginia visited her dad when he was 93 years old, he left the card game they were playing and brought back the dittoed punishment that was more than 50 years old.

"We all started to laugh," Virginia wrote in the story of her life. "Can you imagine him keeping that all these years?"

Not surprisingly, when Virginia and her sister were about 5 and 4 years old, their stockings at Christmas were filled with coal. "Dad had put the coal in because we had been such 'bad little girls,'" Virginia wrote. But the next year they got "Bylo Baby" dolls.

"One of the nicest things my dad did with the little money we had was to buy me roller skates," Virginia wrote. "He came home from work one day and handed me skates. Before long, I had bruises and skinned knees, but I didn't care. I loved those skates and wore them all the time."

Virginia and her sister walked two miles to attend a parochial school, and she wrote, "The nuns held a bit of mystery for me. We never saw their hair, and we always wondered what they were hiding underneath their long skirts.

"I remember one nun lifting her skirt while she was teaching us a dance for a school program. She was very musical. I remember being surprised that she could dance and that she was showing off her little black shoes to us."

In high school, Virginia started her dancing career with Jack Gaity but then met fellow dancer Lambert Drumm.

The first time she saw him was during a Christmas show, and she was waiting in the wings, watching him on stage doing a tumbling act with another man.

They became an "item," and he taught her to drive. She quit high school in the last six weeks of her junior year to marry himon March 17, 1937, when she was 17 and Lambert was 20.

However, right before they were married, Virginia wrote that he had shot her, twice actually.

"The first time it happened, I was on top of a piano, and Lambert had a whip and gun," she wrote. "We were in the dance studio rehearsing a number. He was the animal trainer, and I was a lion or tiger.

"As he cracked the whip, I would do an acrobatic trick on the piano. Then he'd crack the whip again, and I would dance and do more tricks. In one part of the routine, he was to shoot a blank, and I was to do this big dive into his arms. However, one time when he shot the blank, the wad accidentally got stuck in the gun and then exploded out, peppering the whole side of my leg with pellets."

At the clinic, Lambert gave the suspicious nurse fake names and took Virginia to their family doctor for a tetanus shot.

"The second time Lambert shot at me, I was pregnant with our third child, Lana," Virginia wrote. "I had been crocheting a lot of little baby clothes and was keeping them in a special chest. Lara, my cousin, and her husband Arley were visiting us. I was showing Clara the baby clothes that I had made.

"It was hunting season, and Lambert had his hunting gun out showing it to Arley, when it went off, hitting the door jam and barely missing me. It was very unlike Lambert, because he was always so careful."

The couple started their own dance studio in Bridgeport, Ohio, but when the economy took a downturn during the World War II era, Lambert opened the Drumm Machine Company while Virginia ran the dance studio.

"We led a simple life," she said. "We had an outhouse and pumped our water. I packed his lunch and would do things like paint a face on a banana or take a bite out of his sandwich."

The couple had four daughters, and Virginia wrote, "Having four girls didn't really bother me. It was kind of a joke in the family, because even the dog was a girl. We loved our girls and never regretted not having a boy."

After the couple had been happily married for 33 years, Lambert died of kidney failure when he was only 53 years old.

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