So the ‘Dancing Never Stops’

One donor honored his late wife by creating a scholarship fund to keep her love of dance alive.

It began with a song and a dance. From an old vaudeville number. Performed by a musical group called the Olios at The Sawdust Theatre in Coquille, in the southern Oregon coastal range.

Les Engle doesn’t remember the song. But he will never forget the woman.

Becky Armstrong. Trim in a flashy handmade dancing costume ... well, her legs were the point, weren’t they? Her smile dazzled every seat in the house.

And here was Les, one of the Olios, with red hair and mustache, wearing a bowler and vest. A counselor at Marshfield High School, learning to tap dance. Smitten. 

Ballet, tap, jazz, East Coast swing, West Coast swing, waltz, zydeco — Becky knew every step and twirl, every twist and shimmy. She’d studied dance since childhood. Les could pick her up and turn her in a cartwheel on stage, but by and large, “She liked to keep her feet on the floor,” he remembers.

Partners onstage and off

In 1982, they married, each for the second time — and kept dancing. Becky Engle became stepmother to Les Jr., Valerie and Andrea — and kept dancing. In their first year of marriage, going through Les’ high school memorabilia, she spied a dance card from her senior prom at Myrtle Point High School. Turns out, Les had played her prom with another band, The Penatones. She was not on his dance card that night. But she was for the rest of her life.

Becky loved sweets and Valentine’s Day, hated cooking, caught the genealogy bug and found faraway relatives. She collected so many dolls that Les finally had to build a 10 ft by 14 ft room with vaulted ceilings and a patio for them.

Throughout their life together, Becky danced and danced and danced. 

A lifetime of dance and devotion

In 2001, Les took on a reoccurring role in TV ads as the manic pitchman for Farr’s True Value in Coos Bay. A reporter from The World described him as a “Jerry Stiller look-a-like.” Rather than keep the money, Les directed his pay for the commercials to the Marshfield High School Scholarship Fund, where he served as the chair of the scholarship committee.

The Engles retired from performing with The Sawdust Theatre, but Becky kept a foot in the biz by co-directing The Liberty Theatre’s Little Ole Opry. The couple retired from their day jobs, too; Les as the Activity Director at Marshfield and Becky from a career as a dental hygienist. But Becky never retired from dance.

Into her 70s she took dance lessons at the Pacific School of Dance, a community impact program of the Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Oregon. Becky kept dancing, right up until cancer and the pandemic kept her home, and she died four years later in 2023 at the age of 79.

Becky’s service, held in the social hall of the Catholic Church, was standing room only. Les' band reunited for the occasion, and 260 people pushed the tables and chairs away and danced.

'How do you remember a woman like that, besides all the time?'

Somehow, Les made it through that first year. One day, as he stood in the kitchen waiting for his coffee to warm up, his eyes settled on a pile of papers he needed to sort. He saw brown paper sacks in the pile, one marked friends, one family. He opened the one for family and found a stack of greeting cards that Becky bought before she passed. 

He chose a card. “To my husband on Valentine’s Day,” it read. His eyes slid to the calendar. It was Valentine’s Day. 

“I just got chills,” he said. “I couldn’t explain how it happened. That, for me, was a special Valentine’s greeting from Becky after her passing.”

How do you remember a woman like that, besides all the time? 

If you’re Les, and you’re committed to helping young people achieve their dreams, you start the Becky Engle Memorial Dance Scholarship Fund at Oregon Community Foundation to support the Pacific School of Dance at the Boys & Girls Club. 

And you make the fund permanent — so the dancing never stops.