Creston graduate helped others put best foot forward

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series about the 2024 inductees into the Creston High School Hall of Fame.

Leslie Tyler’s career was just another song-and-dance. That phrase is not just a figure of speech. She taught dance to an estimated thousands of students during her 34 years before retiring in 2021.

A 1976 graduate of Creston High School, Tyler will be inducted Friday into the Creston Community Schools Hall of Fame as an alumni. The ceremony with the other inductees will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at Creston High School auditorium.

Exposure to music and feet shuffling came at a young age. Her father Oscar Lovell and mother Theresa were involved in music. Dad had a dance band and her parents knew all the dance steps on the floor.

“I loved the music,” Tyler said about her youth.

She would eventually learn music from Mary Louise Petznick, Dick Bauman and dance from Betty Dybdahl when her mother signed her up at age 4. During her high school and years at Southwestern Community College, Tyler was thinking more about taking steps down the aisle of commercial airplane as an airline steward. Those visions of takeoffs and seatbelts were interrupted by being asked about her interest in teaching dance by Petznick and Bauman.

“They were a huge influence on me,” she said.

And then there was Dybdahl.

“She encouraged me to keep studying. ‘I can teach you all I know, but you need to go out and experience it,’” Tyler said about Dybdahl’s advice.

After graduating from Creston High she attended Southwestern as the airline steward plan was still on the to-do list. But Dybdahl’s comment was also on the to-do list. During the summers, Tyler visited dance schools in other cities. There was a Jazz dance class in Chicago just for her to see how students progressed. Or there was New York City and its dance venues. Things were coming together for Tyler. She had enough to open her own studio.

Her dance studio, Dance and Body Emporium, opened in 1979. The name eventually changed to Leslie’s Dance Emporium.

“I would teach dance during the year, then spend the money made running across the country in the summers,” she said.

There were two days in Minneapolis watching tap dance class led by the Nicholas brothers’ grandchildren. Fayard and Harold Nicholas were known for tap dancing from the 1930s to the 1950s. Tyler took one of her students with her.

“It still felt like I was taking a class from the brothers,” she said.

She met Savion Glover who contributed to “Sesame Street” and to television commercials. She said Glover had some success on Broadway.

“He made his feet go 100 mph,” she said, also remembering his emphasis to ask questions.

“If you don’t ask, how do I know what you don’t know,” she said was his advice. Tyler also watched ballet in Hawaii.

“Who turns down an offer to go to ballet in Hawaii,” she laughed. “I am blessed because God let it happen. But I still had not given up on the airline steward.”

That thought quickly changed during a conversation with her mother.

“I really like teaching dance,” she remembered telling her mother. “Mom said, ‘You’re afraid of heights.’” That made the airline steward vision fade away.

“When I was in high school, my parents gave me a plaque. ‘My life is a gift of God. What I do with it is my gift back to to God.’”

The dance instructor was the foundation for something deeper for the students; giving opportunities that may not happen often.

“I’ve been around,” she said about her career. “I’ve been blessed. I’m not a world traveler but I saw a program where you can dance at Disney. Some parents might take their kids to Disney every year. Some kids might never leave Creston. Some people don’t have the opportunity or are not given that opportunity,” she said.

That chance to dance at Disney started in 1998. A donation of $1,000 was for the 72 students to have matching sweatshirts while there. “It was so successful, we did it three more times,” she said about the Disney trips.

Tyler said she has seen all walks of life from students in her classes. There is no one demographic for a typical dance student.

“Some look at dance and think it’s a luxury. People may think it’s the affluent, but it’s all walks of life,” she said. “The farm family kids had the most respect, showed up on time and had no excuses.”

Ashley Ostroski Hill is one of the estimated thousands of dance students Tyler has seen over the years.

“We have been on many dance adventures over the years,” she said about her relationship with Tyler. Ostroski Hill started dancing when she was 3. When she reached high school, Ostroski Hill went with Tyler on some of those dance experience trips.

“We did all sorts of dance things,” she said. Ostroski Hilll, 43, said it’s been hard to separate her dance experiences from Tyler.

“There are two things I can say about dance. I was not involved with a college drill team, but I subbed at a dance studio for a year. That was my first recital she was never at,” she said about a studio in De Soto, west of Des Moines. “It was the first time doing something dance without her.”

Ostroski Hill said dance helped her confidence at a young age, and can be the same with others.

“I have memories of my mom saying I was so shy at my first recital,” she said. Her costume was like a bee and the dancers were to shake to depict the bee’s movements. “If this is going to be it, part of dance is getting kids out there.”

The middle school years brought the competitions, including solo performances. The competitions were usually early in the day in Des Moines. “Then, they were not the big things they are now,” she said.

Ostroski Hill said Tyler would sometimes intentionally combine both; perform in a competition and then do further instruction.

“You always remember the life lessons. If the other team is competing, you don’t get to walk out. You stay until the end. You clap for everyone,” she said.

Those life lessons were also interpreted on the stage.

“There are dances that stick out; ones comes out at different seasons of my life,” Ostroski Hill said. “Her ‘On Golden Pond’ compilation was before I was a big kid in the dance studio. I was not in it, but that dance honored past students that had passed away. I remembered looking up to those big kids,” she said.

Of all the dances Ostroski Hill observed or participated, she was more interested in tap. After high school, which included ballet, she tried clogging. She said still likes tap “because I dont’ have to be as flexible, but those rhythm ones have challenges.”

Ostroski Hill said dance impacted her career path. She said she researched dance and how it could help people. She attended Drexel, a private college in Philadelphia, that has a program in dance movement therapy.

“Things we learned in dance class and how to express yourself. Use dance as a place to let emotions out. Use it to communicate what is hard to say but dance it out,” she said. “Dance is like a bunch of men talking about their football days.”

Ostroski Hill still works in mental health therapy.

2023 Creston High graduate Trinity Woody started dancing when she was 7, and like Ostroski Hill, was shy about it.

“My parents wanted me in a sport so I could get out of my shell,” she said. She said she was comfortable with dance, at first, and continued to dance when the family moved to Creston from Colfax when she was 10.

She said Tyler made her feel at home.

“When we moved to Creston she was one of the first I met,” looking for a dance studio. “She helped us a lot to get used to living in a new place.”

As the time and practices passed, Woody picked up Tyler’s personality. “She was very passionate. She wanted to teach us to understand what we are doing. She was very caring and wanted the best for us.” Woody said she has since preferred contemporary and clog dances.

“Clog is not tap. it’s different technically. There are some similarities, but it’s how you shift the weight in your feet,” she said.

Woody said her sophomore year in high school is when she knew she wasn’t going to give up dance, partially because of how Tyler treated her.

“During a practice, we had a solo, and she always tried to find ways to incorporate both of our ideas, not just what I wanted do. I have found some teachers tell you what to do, even if you are uncomfortable. She was the opposite, she wanted your input and comfortable with what you are doing.”

Now a dance major at the University of Iowa, she hopes to some day audition for shows, Broadway or other dance companies. She already has had some experience with the Martha Graham Dance Company, based in New York City and goes back to 1926.

“When I found out, she was one of the first people I told,” Woody said about Martha Graham’s school of dance.

Tyler compared dance to sports and how both have changed over the decades.

“It’s evolved to crazy flexibility and tricks. Aerials and cartwheels were not a big deal then. Now, if you can cartwheel with no hands, that is what the big deal is.”

And what used to be dedication at three hours a week practice, she said is now defined at least at 12 hours.

“You get an adrenaline rush when you do something good, like when you catch the ball,” she said. “There is also a challenge. You have to push yourself as in sports. You are not going to be the best. You have to listen and learn. I see similarities between dance and sport. The payoff is the acknowledgement.”