Gladys Smaller just couldn’t keep her feet still.
“She’d be sitting somewhere and hear music and her feet would start moving,” said her niece, Clella Di Orio of Pueblo.
Everyone knew Smaller’s addiction to dance — for years she taught dance in Cañon City and choreographed annual recitals and the yearly high school revue, called “Tiger Tails.”
Smaller, who was 90 when she died Nov. 7, started children dancing when they were “probably 3 or 4,” said Di Orio.
Her son, Sonny Smaller, was 5 when she enlisted him, and “I wasn’t happy about it,” he said, having no interest in dancing or girls. “It was torture for me,” he said.
Gladys Smaller also involved her students’ mothers in the annual dance recitals — not something that Di Orio expected.
“She worked on us mothers until we agreed,” and they had elaborate costumes for their routines just like the kids.
“You just didn’t say no to Gladys,” Di Orio said.
Smaller “never saw an ugly child, and she just bragged on everyone and how well they did,” Di Orio said. “She made even the backward and bashful kids feel like a million.”
Smaller, who stood a slender 5 feet tall that fit her name, helped mothers who didn’t sew make costumes, all of which she designed. They included hot pink satin outfits and sailor suits, bullfighter costumes and designs in black and white.
“She had a very creative mind,” whether it was dance routines, choreography or outfits, Di Orio said.
Smaller donated the income from recitals to charity.
Gladys Lorene Goff was born July 4, 1918, in Stroud, Okla., and moved to Colorado with her family when she was young.
She began dancing as a child watching her older sister do the Charleston, her son said. She taught herself other dances.
She married Elmer Smaller on Sept. 23, 1939, and while he was in the military during World War II, she got a job welding on freighters in the Oakland, Calif., shipyards.
After she and her husband returned to Cañon City, Gladys Smaller and her sister, Mary Lee Fontecchio, opened Blondies’ Cafe (they were both blond) and, because the war was still on and there was food rationing, they often served donations of food from people who had raised it in their own gardens, said Sonny Smaller.
“Gladys would try anything,” said Di Orio. She rode broncos and steers and was reportedly the first woman ever to solo in a small plane at the Fremont County Airport in Cañon City, said her son.
“She had incredible energy, never complained, never gave up and was lots of fun,” her son said, adding that she also “was always happy to give you her opinion.”
In addition to him, she is survived by three grandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
