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Photo by Dan Smith
Miss Kay
Miss Kay Burleson Wilkins in the 1980s.
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Photo by Dan Smith
Cranberry High School 1960
The 1960 team from Cranberry High School (scroll to end of story for names).
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Photo by Dan Smith
David Tate and Freida Julian
David Tate and Freida Julian, from the 1966 team
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Photo by Dan Smith
Dance team
Old-timers put on a show at a Cranberry High School reunion.
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Photo by Dan Smith
Miss Kay
Miss Kay Burleson Wilkins in the 1980s.
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Photo by Dan Smith
Teresa Shadoin
The student is the teacher -- Teresa Shadoin, left, carries on Miss Kay's legacy with her own students today.
There are champions and there are championships. In Avery County, N.C., they’re both about square dancing and it’s just about the best you’ve ever seen anywhere.
If Kay Burleson Wilkins had been a football coach, there’d be a stadium and a lot of kids named after her. If she’d coached in Texas, there’d be a town called Miss Kay, Texas. In Oklahoma, they’d have named oil wells for her and in Knoxville, Tenn., she’d have rated at least a street, same as famous Lady-Vols basketball coach Pat Summitt.
But she didn’t coach football. She coached square dancing. She coached about as well as anyone ever has, but outside a poor, isolated county in northwest North Carolina, she’s not only unknown, and she was never paid as a coach. Not a penny. More’s the pity.
The numbers tell part of the story: two national championships, eight state championships, 19 out of 25 wins of the Old Smokey trophy at the Mountain Youth Jamboree in Asheville, N.C. (enough to retire it), a slew of state fair titles and scores of other, lesser trophies.
But there’s a legacy beyond championships that Miss Kay left her county. It is one of good citizens who learned about the world outside, adjusted to it, mastered it and became functioning parts of its successes, all with a cool, self-assured, cultured ease, not lessons you’d learn trying to run over a 300-pound tackle.
Avery County had never made much of an impact before Miss Kay. In fact, the only other team state championship of any kind by any Avery school during her tenure at Cranberry High, and later at the consolidated Avery County High, came when Newland High and its seven-foot-four-inch center Tommy Burleson (who was destined for a national championship at N.C. State and stardom as a pro) won a state basketball title in the late 1960s.
Kay Wilkins – forever known as Miss Kay, a southern recognition of both respect and familiarity – was born in Plumtree, N.C., on Sept. 20, 1920, daughter of the owner of C.W. Burleson & Company, a general store that today, she says, “would be called a shopping center.” Her mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse, “standing on crates to diagram sentences.”
Her father called square dances on Saturday nights and young Kay watched and learned. At one point she entered a Charleston dance contest, finished second and was hooked on dance.
Miss Kay returned home to Avery County in 1948 after college at Montreat near Asheville, Appalachian State Teachers College in Boone and an early-career adventure in New York – where she went to modeling school and worked for the Navy and Avon at Rockefeller Center. At Rockefeller Center, she often watched the Rockettes practice and that made a lasting impression (the legend in Avery County is that she was a Rockette; she laughs at that). She signed on as a teacher at Cranberry High School in 1948, instantly took over the basketball team and started a square dance team to compete in the Mountain Youth Jamboree in Asheville. By 1951, the team had won its first Old Smokey trophy and the string was on.
MISS KAY married Bill Wilkins, a salesman for a mica company in Mitchell County, just south of Avery, about that time.
Poverty has been the rule in Avery County through most of its history. There was barely enough money for football and basketball at a high school so poor it only had one team color: green.
Miss Kay, showing a grit and determination that would mark her dance, basketball and majorette teams for the next 36 years, made do. She was never paid for any coaching she did. She was Cranberry High School’s bookkeeper, as well, and wasn’t paid for that, either.
“That’s the way it was then,” she says now. “Never got a penny from the school or the county.” Were men coaches paid? “Oh, sure.”
She recruited the school’s athletes to dance, convincing the boys that this was just as much a part of their manhood as running into other boys with a football in hand. The cheerleaders, majorettes and girls’ basketball players were less difficult to convince and soon she had a team, one with athletic grace, toughness and endurance and a cultural background that made teaching steps easy.
Costumes, a major part of any dance competition, were designed initially by Miss Kay and made in home economics classes. Later, team members – boys and girls – suggested designs.
“Some of those costumes looked like spacesuits,” says Norma Ann Buchanan, class of ’59. Most didn’t, though, and the team became known as original in dress and routine.
Miss Kay designed routines that were simple and sophisticated in the same instant, eventually wowing crowds all over the country.
Her teams became so fundamentally sound that when Miss Kay determined in the few minutes before a performance that changes needed to be made, the new steps were inserted with little difficulty.
She recalls that shortly after video technology became available, Asheville’s Lee Edwards High square dance team members shot footage of Cranberry practicing before a competition and “the next year, when we saw them again, they had several of our figures in their routine.
“We won anyway.”
The competition between Lee Edwards and Cranberry was intense over the years – big school vs. small school – but Cranberry dominated.
Miss Kay’s legacy was on display this past summer during the school’s All-Class Reunion when an impromptu square dance team of 60-somethings came down out of the audience in the school’s gym at the behest of Teresa Shadoin, a teacher carrying on in the Miss Kay tradition, and entertained fellow former students. They looked like they’d been practicing for a year.
Teresa Shadoin, who graduated from Avery County High in 1978 after four years of dancing for Miss Kay, has become a national championship square dance coach herself, continuing the tradition in Avery County at several schools and with independent teams. Her teams began at Avery High School and have trickled down into the middle and elementary school grades. Like Miss Kay’s, Shadoin’s teams have won a national title, 12 state titles and many other awards. Recently, her cloggers competed at the North Carolina Folk Festival for the first time since Miss Kay retired.
Shadoin is a retired competitive professional ballroom dancer who says that when she began teaching at Avery High, her goal was to emulate Miss Kay. It shows in her routines and costume designs.
Shadoin followed Debbie Oaks Ward in the late 1990s as the primary coach of square dancing in Avery County. Ward, who also danced for Miss Kay and had a smooth team at Riverside Elementary (K-8) from the mid-1970s to 1998. Her team often accompanied the team Shadoin was on in 1976-’78.
THERE ARE SEVERAL STYLES of square dancing and the Avery teams have made their name primarily in the “smooth” version, though they are also accomplished in clog and buck dancing, as well as Western dance. Smooth descends from English and Scottish country dance.
David Vance (class of 1958), Avery County’s fire marshal these days and a guy who still serves as a square dance caller, says, “I had this Baptist background, so I didn’t know anything about dancing until I got to high school… It was a complex activity. We’d have 68 different calls in a 10- to 12-minute routine and you danced once in a competition, so you had to get it right. You have to have rhythm, an understanding of the music and a listening base with your left foot. You glide and slide to keep your balance.”
Teresa Shadoin insists there was a lot more learning going on with Miss Kay’s teams than square dance steps.
“These were kids who’d never been out of the county,” she says today. “They were learning culture, dancing and eating dinner at country clubs, entertaining people. They learned how to act, how to speak, how to behave in public.” Miss Kay “was strict. You had to get it right,” says Shadoin.
“My mother once told me to make sure my first impression on students was the one I wanted,” says Miss Kay, “because it would be the one they would always remember.”
Norma Jean Buchanan Puckett, who danced in 1959 for Miss Kay at Cranberry, says she had to get her grades up before she could compete.
“The first two years, I didn’t make it,” she says. But the carrot worked and Norma Jean got some of the benefits: “I was shy, but she stressed putting a smile on and keeping it on. It brought me out… She was the best coach I ever saw.”
“She was a Vince Lombardi,” says Johnny Garland, who is retired from an airline and was a Cranberry football player before making the square dance team. “I had run away from home at 15 and she made high school bearable for me. She was the best; really, really good.”
“If you don’t discipline, you don’t earn respect,” says Miss Kay. “I never made a threat I didn’t intend to carry out.”
Johnny was being raised at Grandfather Home for Children in Avery County and Miss Kay “made sure people from the orphanage had money to eat on. She went in her pocket for it sometimes.”
Miss Kay went into her pocket often. “If I picked up the school bus to go to a competition and the gas tank wasn’t full, I had to fill it out of my pocket.”
“When I first tried out – in front of the whole school – I was scared to death,” says Betty Hughes Robbins, who danced in 1960 and ’61. “[Miss Kay] became a role model to me in every sense. You know, she wouldn’t hold practice on Wednesday nights because she knew those old Baptists had prayer meeting Wednesdays. She just wouldn’t do it and people respected that.”
“Yes,” says Mary Lou Coffey Griffin (1958), and “no matter where we were, we went to church on Sunday as a team. In hotels, girls were on one side, boys on the other.”
“Daddy wouldn’t let me play basketball,” says Vickie Young Suddreth (1967), “because I’d be out late, but I got to dance and we were out late, too. With Miss Kay, the expectations were always very high and we didn’t want to disappoint her. She wasn’t touchy-feely, but she was patient and persistent… and compassionate.”
Norma Ann Buchanan (who is not related to Norma Jean Buchanan) says, “I’ll tell you what made it work for her: she was fearless.
“Her confidence was always strong and she was not scared to try anything. Even in failure, she’d change something grand.”
And she was resourceful, says Buchanan. “Miss Kay had this big mayonnaise jar with pimiento cheese in it and we’d make sandwiches from it on trips. Nobody had any money, but, you know, once in Spruce Pine, I took a salt shaker from a place where we’d performed and she made me take it back and apologize. I was humiliated, but she gave me a kind of confidence I would never have had otherwise. I went on to be a beauty queen [Miss Dixie] and Miss Kay had a lot to do with it.”
Says Teresa Shadoin: “The important thing to remember is that no matter what Miss Kay did, she did it with style, grace and determination. Whoever she coached was a champion on the court, the dance floor, the field. She taught us about life and made all of us better individuals. Because of her, many former dancers had travel opportunities, learned new cultural experiences and gained self-assurance. With great confidence, we were able to venture beyond the county lines and experience the world.”
These days, Miss Kay lives in a nursing home in Marion, N.C., with a lot of those memories of dance teams and trophies and lessons taught and learned. The Cranberrian Corporation, which has turned the old high school into a community center, has made a shrine of Miss Kay’s old room on the second floor. It’s not a football stadium, a street or a town, but it’s Miss Kay’s and – like her – elegant in its simplicity.
Top photo: The 1960 team – front row, left to right: Jackie Shomaker Burleson, Betty Estep, Linda Greene Avery, Gail Townsend, Linda Avery Shumate, Betty Hughes Robbins, Helen Thomas, Susan Tate. Back row: Bill Tate, Skip Clark, Russell Greer, Sherril Rominger, unidentified, Freddie Dickerson, Vernon Pittman, Gary Townsend.
Dan Smith is editor of the Valley Business Front and author of the memoir "Burning the Furniture."