The Arthur Murray Dance Studio

A dialogue between Baby Houseman and Johnny Castle

Baby
So where'd you learn to be a dancer?

Johnny
Well, this guy came into this luncheonette one day, and we were all sitting around doing nothing. And he said that Arthur Murray was giving a test for instructors.

So, if you passed, they teach you different dances, show you how to break them down, teach them.

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The Wikipedia article about Arthur Murray includes the following passages:

Arthur Murray (April 4, 1895 – March 3, 1991) was an American ballroom dancer and businessman, whose name is most often associated with the dance studio chain that bears his name. ....

Arthur Murray was born in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, in 1895 as Moses Teichman. In August 1897, he was brought to America by his mother Sarah .... They settled in Ludlow Street, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his father, Abraham Teichmann.

Murray was shy as a child and self-conscious about his tall, lanky appearance. He wanted very much to be a part of the social activities that most of his friends enjoyed, particularly the dances, but was afraid to socialize with girls. At the age of 14, Joe Feigenbaum, a friend of his whom he admired because of his popularity with girls, taught him his first dance steps. To get practice on the dance floor, Murray attended weddings in his neighborhood, where he found willing dance partners of every size and age.

In 1912, at the age of 17, he taught dance at night while working as a draftsman by day. He studied under the popular dance team of Irene and Vernon Castle and went to work for them.

Murray won his first dance contest at the Grand Central Palace, a public dance hall where he later became a part-time dance teacher after graduation from high school. The first prize had been a silver cup, but Murray went home with nothing to show for his win. His partner of the evening took it; it was destined for a pawnshop. This loss made an impression on Murray, and in later years every winner in his dance contests took home a prize.

Between jobs as a dance instructor, Murray worked as a draftsman at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and as a reporter at the New Haven Register.

He soon began teaching ballroom dancing to patients from the greater Boston, Massachusetts area, at the Devereux Mansion Physical Therapy Clinic in Marblehead, Massachusetts, before moving to Asheville, North Carolina. At the outbreak of World War I, under the pressure of the anti-German sentiment prevalent in the U.S., Teichmann changed to a less German-sounding name.

In 1919, Murray began studying business administration at the Georgia School of Technology, and taught ballroom dancing in Atlanta at the Georgian Terrace Hotel. In 1920, he organized the world's first "radio dance"; a band on the Georgia Tech campus played "Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech" and other songs, which were broadcast to a group of about 150 dancers (mostly Tech students) situated atop the roof of the Capital City Club in downtown Atlanta.

Murray was inspired by a casual remark made by William Jennings Bryan one evening at the hotel: "... You know, I have a fine idea on how you can collect your money. Just teach 'em with the left foot and don't tell 'em what to do with the right foot until they pay up!" Murray thought about Bryan's remark, and devised the idea of teaching dance steps with footprint diagrams supplied by mail. Within a couple of years, over 500,000 dance courses had been sold.

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On April 24, 1925, Murray married his famous dance partner, Kathryn Kohnfelder, whom he had met at a radio station in New Jersey. She had been in the audience while he was broadcasting a dance lesson.

After their marriage, the mail-order business declined and the Murrays opened a dance school offering personal instruction. Their business prospered, especially in 1938 and 1939 when Arthur picked two little-known dances, the "Lambeth Walk" and "The Big Apple", and turned them into dance crazes. They were taught at hotel chains throughout the country, and the name "Arthur Murray" became a household word.

This business was expanded more widely in 1938, when an Arthur Murray dance studio franchise was opened in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Others followed. His slogan was: "If you can walk, we teach you how to dance", and the company guaranteed that the pupils learn to dance in ten lessons.

After WWII, Murray's business grew with the rise of interest in Latin dance, and he regularly taught and broadcast in Cuba in the 1950s. Murray went on television with a dance program hosted by his wife, Kathryn Murray, The Arthur Murray Party, which ran from 1950 to 1960, on CBS, NBC, DuMont, ABC, and then on CBS. ....

In the late 1970s. By then, there were more than 3,560 dance studios bearing his name. In 2007, about 220 Arthur Murray Studios remained in operation..

The Arthur Murray company has a webpage with an illustrated timeline of Murray's life and his company.

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The following video shows parts of an Arthur Murray Party episode that was broadcast in October 1958.

When this episode was broadcast, Baby Houseman would have been about 13 years old.

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Later in this blog, I published a follow-up article titled Working as an Instructor at Arthur Murray.