Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 2, 1995 TAG: 9506300017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Make no mistake, baton-twirling is a big part of who she is.
This is, after all, a woman who learned how to do cartwheels in her 50s by practicing in her back yard and is still twirling fire batons at Fourth of July ceremonies in her 60s, astounding audiences who could have sworn that was a teen-ager up on the darkened stage.
"You just get hooked on it," she says. "It's like when a man wants to fish or play ball. It's either something you love or don't want to do." And with her, it's been a love.
A pixie of a woman graced with a supple wrist and a patient disposition, Dooley started out teaching the neighborhood girls in the driveway of her Northeast Roanoke home and went on to become a local institution in the world of parades and halftime shows, of talent shows and recitals.
Those eentsy-weentsy tots in the red-and-white uniforms of the Southernettes Baton Corps at the Roanoke Christmas parade or the Vinton Dogwood Festival parade? Those were Dooley's charges.
So were many of the majorettes who have entertained at high school football games from Lord Botetourt to Staunton River.
If you were a girl growing up in Roanoke anytime in the past 35 years and wanted to learn the baton, the odds are your mom took you to Marceline Dooley.
How many girls has Dooley taught? Thousands, easily, she figures. Some started as young as 4, others stayed with her until they were well into their 20s.
"Whenever I'm out in public," Dooley says, "someone will stop me and say, `Miz Dooley, I had you years and years ago. Are you still teaching?' I thought maybe I ought to retire, so people wouldn't ask `are you still teaching?'''
The most important lessons she's been teaching, though, may be the ones her students remember long after their batons are stashed away with the high school yearbooks. D.D. Guilliams of Roanoke once studied under Dooley and now has two daughters doing the same. "She teaches more than baton," Guilliams says, "she teaches them how to be a lady."
On the final day of Dooley's spring baton class for the Roanoke County Parks and Recreation Department, she's still looking ahead.
"Now catch it," she gently admonishes the 10 girls who have gathered in the sweltering gymnasium at Herman L. Horn Elementary School in Vinton. "Put that hand out there."
This is the advanced class, and only about half of the girls teetering on the edge of their teen-age years are able to pull off the double leg toss - and then only about half of the time.
"You work at it every day and you'll be able to do it," Dooley encourages them. "You can't try it today and wait a week and be able to do it. You have to try every day."
"Miz Dooley. I just hit my chin!"
"Hey Miz Dooley. I caught it like this!"
"Ow!"
Dooley smiles understandingly. "All right, let's show them something you can do. Show them your nose spin."
The girls obediently rest their batons on their noses, and commence spinning 'round like a collection of tops, except for one determined girl in the front row who keeps trying to flip the baton under one leg and catch it under the other.
Dooley is indulgent of her work ethic. "You're going to get that toss before next year."
One winter back in the late 1950s, a young housewife in Northeast Roanoke had a simple, if somewhat unusual Christmas wish.
Marceline Dooley wanted a baton.
The kind she'd twirled as a teen-ager back home in Missouri. "I thought it was the greatest thing in the world," she says, for reasons she still can't explain except that it's "relaxing."
David Dooley, being the obliging sort, bought her one, and soon his wife was amusing the whole neighborhood with her twirls.
"I had some neighborhood girls who loved to watch me twirl," she recalls. "I started teaching them in the driveway at home. Others saw it and wanted to twirl, too. Next thing you know, someone told the Preston Park Center around it," and the city parks and recreation officials came calling, looking for an instructor.
There was a valley full of baby boomer girls who wanted to learn baton, and Dooley became their teacher. In 1960, to give her students a public outlet for their talents, she formed the Southernettes - a combination of "Southern" and "majorettes" - and began marching and performing wherever a crowd could be found.
In time, the Southernettes, hundreds strong, became one of the largest baton corps in the state. "It's the one," says Stephanie Ratliff, a former student from Salem who now has the task of taking over Dooley's responsibilities as the Southernettes leader. "Any of the baton teachers in Northern Virginia know her. I think everybody knows there's this big group down in Roanoke."
To give her baton classes something special to look forward to, Dooley organized an annual "recital" that evolved from a makeshift performance in the cafeteria at Preston Park Elementary School to an elaborate production that now fills the auditorium stage at the Roanoke Civic Center with all the glitz of the Miss Virginia Pageant.
For many girls, this was their first, and maybe only, chance to perform on a real stage with a real audience.
"It was neat," says Debbie Aspel, another former student from years gone by. "We had little papier-mache hats with sequins." Dooley herself had no daughters, but each of her three sons was pressed into service as a drummer, while her husband emceed. "The boys didn't have any choice," Dooley says. "It was Mama's baton course."
Others remember it in grander terms. "To us, that's our Broadway," says Beth Hall, who started in the fourth grade and studied baton under Dooley for the next 24 - yes, 24 - years. "To us, that's the big thing at the end of the year. It was, `I can't do this, I can't do that, the recital's coming.'''
In time, Dooley's girls grew up, became moms with daughters of their own. And when it became time to find an after-school activity for them, what else but baton?
"When I came into the Roanoke County Parks and Rec office and found out Marceline was still teaching, I said, `you're taking baton from Mrs. Dooley,''' Aspel remembers telling her daughter.
The astonishing thing isn't that the former students remember Dooley some two decades later; it's the other way around. Aspel says she wasn't a star twirler by any means and only stuck with baton for three or four years. Yet Dooley didn't just remember her, Aspel says. "She knew exactly who I was."
Talk to the moms who have seen Dooley's baton classes from both sides, and they all say the same thing.
Kathy Hedrick: "The patience of a saint."
D.D. Guilliams: "She never gets frustrated if they get it wrong."
Bonnie Smith: "I've never known her to raise her voice."
Debbie Aspel: "Her motto, from the time I started, was always be ladies, always smile. That's what she wanted and they loved her for it."
No wonder, Guilliams says, one of her daughters came home one day "and made the statement that out of all the teachers she's ever had, she could tell Mrs. Dooley cared the most."
Like the time Dooley encountered a student who couldn't turn the cartwheel the teacher wanted her to include in a routine. "She said, 'Mrs. Dooley, can you do one?' I said, 'I could if I tried.' She said, `I'll try if you can.' So I came home and practiced in the back yard. I've always felt if you really wanted to do something, you can." Never mind that Dooley was 50 at the time.
Smith, who studied under Dooley for 14 years and taught along side her for another 10, says Dooley "keeps up with everybody," and it's easy to believe.
When Hedrick's daughter was in a talent show at school, there was Dooley in the audience, even though it had nothing to do with the Southernettes. When Hall was in high school, Dooley took her and some of her friends to the beach one summer, where they wound up entertaining fellow vacationers by twirling fire batons on the sand. At the county parks and recreation offices, Christmas isn't complete until Dooley shows up with a generous sample of her homemade bread.
The way Dooley approached it, baton-teaching was a full-time job. "Sometimes it's a 24-hour job," she says. "I find myself counting out routines in my sleep."
Yet she never gave that impression to her students. Hall remembers once she was at Dooley's house, getting ready before a parade. "She's got grandkids, and she told her husband if her little girl woke up to tell her that grandmother had gone to work. That was the first time I realized it was a job for her. I always thought it was a hobby. She always made you feel it was her love, and I guess it was."
How else to explain last summer, when the folks at Loch Haven Lake ran behind in contacting the Southernettes for the annual Fourth of July show by the water's edge? It was too late to round up the whole group for the fire-baton routine. "But she said, `that's OK, I'll do it myself,''' club owner Sky Preece remembers. "It was just another teen-ager doing something magical with batons. This teen-ager just happened to be in her 60s. It was really quite marvelous."
|n n| In the back of the gym, a clutch of mothers looks on - an unusual gathering, because normally Dooley bans parents as a distraction. But on this final night there are pizzas and cookies to share and a commemorative plaque to pass out.
"She's going to be one sad lady at the end of the night," predicts Harriet Childress, her supervisor from the parks and recreation office.
Then again, it's Childress who seems the most emotional. Somebody's 4-year-old little sister is running loose in the back of the gym with an over-sized baton, trying to imitate the big girls. She's the one Childress feels sorry for, when she thinks about Dooley's retirement. "These little teeny girls won't get the pleasure of knowing her like the other girls."
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