PROVIDENCE – Recently, a picture of my wife, Toby, and me dancing appeared on her Facebook feed. More than 350 “likes” later, it has reminded me of some of the choices, mostly for the good, that I have had to make since I left home early in my youth.

That photo of my dancing with Toby at my parents’ summer home on Cape Cod in 1969 recalled memories of a part of my family history that I have rarely talked about: my grandfather, Louis Faggen, his two brothers and his brother-in law, Louis Brecker, owned and managed the Roseland Ballroom and the Savoy Ballroom in New York City.

Looking back on what instilled my love of dancing, some might call it “Monday morning quarterbacking.” But, upon the urging of my publisher, I will offer you a description of the dance step not taken.

First, a little history
Roseland, originally founded in Philadelphia in 1917, moved to New York City in 1919, to a location at Broadway and 51st Street. The ballroom’s financing came from Frank Yuengling of the D.G. Yeungling & Son beer family.

Roseland became the home of hot jazz and swing dancing in the 1920s and 1930s, featuring the bands of Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. It was a mostly white dance club that featured black musicians.

The Savoy Ballroom, which opened in 1926, was modeled after the Roseland, but it catered to the black community in Harlem, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets. The poet Langston Hughes called it the “heartbeat of Harlem.” A crowd of some 2,000 was turned away on its opening night, despite a 10,000 square-foot dance floor and a capacity of up to 4,000 people.

At some point, as the story, perhaps apocryphal, was told to me, my grandfather decided to turn his share of the business over to his relatives, worried about the way that the mob had muscled in on the operations. [The Savoy was owned by a partnership that included my grandfather's brother, Jay Faggen, and Moe Gale.]

A little dance music
The love of dancing, however, had a strong influence on my formative education – and an incredible impact on what I chose as my work, and on whom decided to join me in raising kids and building a wonderful community of friends and colleagues.

My introduction to dance came from both of my parents’ love for ballroom dancing as well as classical ballet and Broadway musical theatre.

Some of my earliest memories of childhood were the trips to New York City to see the Thanksgiving Day Parade from the second floor of Roseland, the iconic establishment on Broadway founded by my family.

Even before I was enrolled in ballroom dancing lessons with my younger sister Patricia, I remember my parents dancing by themselves in our living room to music from all the Broadway hits going back to the 1950s.

“Oklahoma,” recently produced by Trinity, reminded me of how immersed we both were by our parents’ love of theatre, music and dance.

Bike ride to the dance studio
At some point, perhaps at about age 10, I rode my bike to the dance studio on East Avenue to learn all the ballroom dances, with my sister as a partner.

Leaving the other kids playing ball on the fields off Pleasant Avenue in Pawtucket’s Oak Hill neighborhood was not too difficult, because many of the kids had family responsibilities on Saturday afternoons, so I never attempted to explain my peculiar reason for having to leave.

Dance classes for the rest of my friends were soon to be a part of all of our schedules. This was a tradition established for many years in the Anglo-Saxon community in Providence and was imitated by the Jewish community on the East Side of Providence.

My friends soon found out how I had been using my time away from the ballfields.

As they began to struggle to learn the fox trot, the Lindy, and the cha-cha, it became clear to them that being a good dancer had value, as they watched all the girls trying to get me to be their partner in class.

My interest in dancing in other cultures would eventually occur, but not until we left Providence.

A dream deferred
Toby and I married one year before I started medical school, so she had time to hear all my mother’s stories about Roseland – and her dream that I would avoid medicine and join the family business then run by her first cousin, Nancy Brecker.

Mom was not subtle about her feelings about physicians and her respect for anyone making a life in the performing arts. Even before she met Adrian Hall and started a 30-year effort to build a repertory theatre in Rhode Island, she worked hard to launch the Rhode Island State Ballet, led by Herci and Miles Marsden.

She tried her hardest to get me into tights by putting me in charge of driving my sister to classes in Lincoln, immediately after getting my license to drive.

I can remember watching the dancers at the exercise bar and seeing Miles driving them like a football coach. Those dancers worked hard, and I was impressed – but not enough to put on the tights.

I did learn a lot from watching Miles Marsen and those dancers about ballet technique and the music of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. I think I could have done the bar exercises then and perhaps even now. Not a pretty sight, but I digress.

My sister’s dance career
My sister’s career in dance brought her to the Boston Ballet where she was a part of the corps. During summers for a few years when I was starting high school, she danced with Rosella Hightower in Paris and Cannes.

I got to tag along and learn French from the kids I met at the beach. The second summer, Rudolph Nureyev defected from Russia, and our family was lucky to see his first performance with Dame Margot Fontaine.

I can still see her standing on stage right, allowing Nureyev to show his stuff. I never will forget him flying across the stage almost in one leap. The audience went mad.

A chorus line
The next few summers I worked as a counselor in a summer camp that had some kind of connection to Broadway and film. One of the older counselors, who produced a Broadway-like play or musical every week, was Marvin Hamlisch.

There were weekly socials with the girls’ camp, where again my comfort on the dance floor got rave reviews from the ladies.

So, it was with some dismay that I finally decided to go to medical school and pass on joining the cousins running Roseland. My mother did not put up much of a fight, I think, because she knew that it had taken me two attempts to gain acceptance to medical school and she realized it was what I wanted.

As my 40 years in public health and pediatrics played out, dancing somehow took a back seat to so many other interests and opportunities that came my way.

But the family gatherings, the weddings and and Bar Mitzvahs were always judged by the quality of the dance band playing.

I still remember my grand uncle’s quote in the newspaper about how we would all be better off if we kept dancing.

I think my grand uncle, Louis Brecker [who was married to Dorothy Faggen, my grand aunt], said it first, but Jimmy Fallon said it most recently: “Keep loving each other, keep respecting each other and keep on dancing.”