Bill Mael filled life with laughter, dance

For Bill Mael, everyday was a new dance.

Mael mastered jitterbugs, polkas and salsas so well that his dance card was packed with requests for lessons.

The rare dance that he didn’t know, he learned by ordering instructional videos and practicing until he became an expert.

“He could lead women so well as the dominant dancer. He even taught a legally blind woman to dance,” said Karen Cornell, director of Spokane Valley Senior Center, one of several senior centers where Mael taught dancing.

Although his instructor services were in constant demand, Cornell said, he didn’t pocket any of his fees.”He never took a dime. He gave it all to the center. He was very generous.”

As a young man, Mael battled a back injury that doctors believed would put him in a wheelchair by 50. He had several heart bypass surgeries and a total of eight stents inserted to open clogged arteries.

Still, the 87-year-old defied health problems and age, and danced almost daily up until July 23, when he died of congestive heart failure.

Born on the outskirts of Pullman, Mael married and had two children while living in Wenatchee. After divorcing, he moved to Rosalia and became a partner in a meat-cutting business.

It was a dance at a Grange hall in Four Lakes that brought Mael and his future wife, Leatha, together.

Leatha had lost her first husband one year earlier, while she was expecting, and was raising her baby daughter, Paula, by herself. At the nudging of close friends, she went dancing for the first time since becoming a widow.

He noticed her great legs and she noticed his charm. “We had a date right away — he kind of rushed me.”

In the fall of 1947, they married and, in the next few years, had two children, Ron and Robin.

After moving to Spokane Valley, Mael worked as a meat cutter until he was hired as a carman for Union Pacific Railroad.

Daughter Robin Gelhausen recalls growing up with a fun-loving father who took the family motorcycle riding and played checkers with his kids for hours at a time.

When the family visited Natatorium Park, the kids found that Dad went on all the rides.

“He was as big a kid as we were. Everything that we did, he would do,” Gelhausen said. “To play, in his life, was before anything else.”

After retiring, Mael’s love for fun blossomed, and he once told Gelhausen that he looked forward to waking up every day “to discover what kind of new things or fun things I can do.”

Boredom wasn’t in Mael’s vocabulary and he entertained himself by hunting and fishing and even painting landscapes.

In fact, he was so active that family members had a hard time pinning him down for doctors’ appointments because he was always on the go.

When Gelhausen was 12, she asked her father for a dance because she worried that he’d be too old to dance with her when she grew up. Decades later, she and other family members were hard-pressed to keep up with her elderly dad.

Leatha likened her husband to the Energizer bunny: “He couldn’t sit around. He just wanted to live every inch of it, I guess.”

Sitting a few dances out was more than OK with Leatha, who happily loaned her suspender-clad husband for dances at the center.

Once a lady took him under the mistletoe and kissed him on the cheek. When he told his wife about the misdeed, she joked, “Tell her that I want my kiss back.”

One week later, Leatha was standing in a checkout line at a supermarket when the smooch-stealing friend came up and jokingly kissed her on the cheek.

Cornell said Mael kept friends and family in stitches. “One day we traded shoes on the dance floor and my 6-inch sandals even fit him.”

In the last few months of his life, Mael lost weight and joked to other seniors that his doctor put him on a new medication called “no-ass-at-all.”

“He was fun. He had a good sense of humor, and all the ladies liked to dance with him. He was a nice human being,” said Madeline Luedtke, a member of Valley Senior Center who worked with Mael to organize senior follies, an annual fund-raiser.

Mael, a natural performer who could play the harmonica and ukulele simultaneously, donned a fake nose and suit and lip-synced Jimmy Durante’s “Ink a Dink a Doo” at benefit follies.

An avid fan of laughter, Mael had off-color toasts for various occasions. A family favorite began, “Here’s to the girl with the little red shoes, she loves her whiskey, she loves her booze. …”

Everyone knew that when fishing season started, Mael’s boat emerged from storage and dance lessons ended. Friends and family were treated to outings on area lakes, and at the family cabin at Diamond Lake.

“Grandpa always let you do what you wanted. You could sit in his boat and you could play with or touch whatever you wanted,” Ali Gelhausen, Bill’s granddaughter recalls. “He would make sure that you got to reel in all the fish because that was the fun part.”

Ali recalls returning from a gathering last year to find her 8-year-old son playing poker with his great-grandfather.

“I think Grandpa thought he was about 16 or 17 years old. He was always just doing fun stuff.”