Issue date: August 26, 1998
By BILL RAYBURN
Song and dance and children are an alluring mix. In fact, the sight of a singing or dancing child will tend to lighten even the darkest of cynical, grownup souls.
At age 60, diminutive Menlo Park nanny Dottie Taylor believes firmly in the healing power of song. Singing to the children under her care has kept her young at heart and, more importantly, she says, imparted the love of song to many children along the way.
Having risen from a background that would have landed many in a poverty of both soul and pocketbook, she glides about the dance floor of life, singing her own tune of love and togetherness.
Dottie embraces song as if it were the elixir to eternal youth. And it just may be for this effervescent Alabama orphan.
When she was 9, her widowed father, failing in health, was forced to turn care of her over to a state orphanage. Instead of sinking into a morass of self pity and despair, Dottie chose to help others. She quickly applied for and was awarded the job of helping the younger girls in the orphanage, including bathing and changing the infants. A nanny was born.
Dottie has raised three kids of her own, two daughters and a son, who have in turn given her five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Though she has remained single since her husband's tragic death in an auto accident 29 years ago, Dottie has made many friends through her singing, dancing and child caring.
"I've sung to all the kids I've cared for," she says. "I sing in the car, I sing when they're sad. It always seems to make things better."
Though outgoing and effusive, Dottie considers herself a private person who finds singing a palliative for her as well as the children. "It can make me happy when I'm sad," she says, "and it cures a lot of ills."
Song has been the bridge that spans the generations between her and the many children she has cared for over the years. "I'm a teacher at heart. I teach manners, how to interact with others. Kids are just little humans."
Dottie is an avid fan of musicals, which combine two of her favorite things, singing and dancing. "I must have seen every musical that came down the pike." Gene Kelley and Ginger Rogers are two dancers Dottie admired.
She learned to tap dance as a girl and remembers one swing dance with a young beau that went awry. "He was swinging me and my hand slipped and I kept twirling on my own and knocked over a table and chairs," she recalls, laughing.
Dottie believes one's destiny is cast at birth, and retains hope that she can fulfill her biggest remaining fantasy: to reunite on her 80th birthday with all the children she has cared for in her life, to see how her charges have grown.
"If I won the lottery, that is what I would want. Then I would travel the world, and not stop until the day I died."
© 1998 The Almanac. All Rights Reserved.