
The Days We Danced
Season 6 Episode 7 | 11m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
Doris Eaton Travis still dances on Broadway at 102 years old, decades after her debut at 14.
Once upon a time, Doris Eaton was the youngest member of the famed "Ziegfeld Follies," taking the Broadway stage in 1918 when he was just 14. Today, at 102, Doris Eaton Travis is the last one left, the last surviving "Follies Girl." And she can still dance. She goes back to Broadway every year to perform at a benefit gala held in the New Amsterdam Theatre, the same stage where she sang and danced.
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Gallery is a local public television program presented by OETA

The Days We Danced
Season 6 Episode 7 | 11m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
Once upon a time, Doris Eaton was the youngest member of the famed "Ziegfeld Follies," taking the Broadway stage in 1918 when he was just 14. Today, at 102, Doris Eaton Travis is the last one left, the last surviving "Follies Girl." And she can still dance. She goes back to Broadway every year to perform at a benefit gala held in the New Amsterdam Theatre, the same stage where she sang and danced.
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Yes way to the left.
And yes we have doing the right is there around the floor by that I said Mr.
Brown, Mr.
Brown, with all your might.
Doris Eaton grew up surrounded by glitz and glamor.
She was born into a family of entertainers.
Talented brothers and sisters who danced and sang their way into the hearts of audiences all along the East Coast.
My mother was a very normal woman, and she never let the showbusiness success of her children go to her head.
In fact, she was forever telling us, don't get conceited.
There's always somebody who can take your place.
Doris was just 14 when she became a Broadway star, getting a part in the greatest show there was in 1918, the world famous Ziegfeld Follies.
Ziegfeld Follies was the biggest show on Broadway.
You couldn't get any higher.
Today, 88 years after that summer when dreams suddenly had come true and the future was a great unknown, Doris Eaton Travis is the only one left, the last of the Ziegfeld Girls and the last of a famous family that ended up being both star struck and star crossed.
Well, I never drank or smoked.
There's one thing which may have kept me healthy, but I just kept very busy mentally and physically and, I just don't think about growing old.
That's all.
I don't have time.
In it.
Just do.
That make sure can move and doctor.
Shake it.
Watch your groove.
Just sit back and we'll let you dance in.
42nd Street.
She's too busy dancing the days away.
Ever since former talk show host Rosie O'Donnell had Doris on her show in 1997 to celebrate the grand reopening of Broadway's historic New Amsterdam Theater, she's been busier than ever.
Set to take seven.
The New Amsterdam is where Florenz Ziegfeld put on the Follies.
That same year, ABC's news magazine show 2020 brought Doris and two of her Follies girls friends back to that famous stage.
I was here in 22, and I was here in 1918 and 19 and 20.
Think of it as a time machine.
I remember we spent our youth here.
Three travelers are entering it now.
All of them above 90 years of age.
We're living legend, right?
We're going to travel with them in this story to somewhere else in time.
And that will explain why these living legends named Doris, Dana and Nona have arrived on this stage.
The theater had fallen into hard times after the Follies, but now it was back, just as Doris and the girls remembered it.
All those years.
All those years, we were the ones.
We were the ones.
Then the new owners of the old theater asked the Follies girls who were then, what supermodels and movie stars are today to come on stage and share the spotlight once again?
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage Doris Eaton.
Travis.
Oh, I get it.
I'm miserable.
They wanted some Ziegfeld girls possible to be there for their first performance.
So there were five of us.
I was the only one though that could dance.
We go.
Up.
From then on, every year they've invited me back to take part in their lovely production.
And the.
It's been a delightful experience.
Oh.
Simply irresistible.
She's not only the oldest person to dance on the Broadway stage, she has also become the oldest graduate of the University of Oklahoma.
When she got a degree with honors in history at the age of 88.
I always remember the college education and traveling.
Of course, I was not able to do that.
So in 79, I said to my husband, Paul, I said, I said, I wish I had a college education.
He looked at me and he said, look here.
You've been moaning and groaning about not having a college education ever since I've known you.
He says, now we're ten minutes from the university.
Either shut up or put up.
So I said, all right, I will.
I was very pleased.
Well, she followed up her bachelor's degree with a master's, and then when she turned 100, an honorary doctorate from a school near her former home in Michigan, Oakland University.
Celebrate your inspiring life of accomplishment by conferring upon you the degree Doctor of Humanities Honors course.
Even now, at 102, she comes into the office of her horse ranch near Norman every day.
It's something she and her husband, Paul, started almost 40 years ago.
Then just fine and great.
You put the mail on my desk?
Yes, ma'am.
It's all laying right there on your desk.
Some friends had a couple of horses and we went to the races with them.
They said, well, I want to buy a horse.
So we bought a horse.
And the horse raced well, so he decided he'd buy a few more.
Pretty soon, they'd outgrown their farm in Michigan and began looking for a horse ranch.
And the gentleman that owned this ranch, Coach Paul, every time he came down here, he's.
If you're going to be in the horse business or the horse business, you got to be in Oklahoma and you got to have a ranch.
So eventually he bought the ranch.
And at an age when most people were thinking about retiring, Doris and her husband had just started a new career.
His second, her third when they met.
Paul Travers was a successful businessman in Detroit, and Doris Eaton was running a chain of Arthur Murray dance Studios.
You have you tuned in on the author Murray Studio's first gold medal ball?
She called him up one day, going through lists of people who signed up for lessons but had never taken a medal.
He said, well, I'd like to invite you down to the studio and have you resume your lessons.
He says, well, no, I don't think I ought to do that.
I think I should meet you first, and I'd know whether I want to come down and take my lessons.
Finally, Doris agreed to have dinner with Paul, and he started his dance lessons again.
Right under your arm.
And for the next year and a half, about every three months or so, he'd call and ask Doris to go to a dinner or a movie.
So finally it becomes a weekly dinner dancing date.
This way.
Ten years later, he calls up and says, I'll meet you at the club.
I said, oh no, you won't.
He said, why not?
I said, because I have other plans.
Bang hung up the receiver.
The next evening, phone rings about the same time.
He says, when do you want to get married?
On this way to your window pane.
They were together the rest of Paul's life, and he lived almost as long as Doris has.
But one of the problems of living to be 102 years old is that you generally outlive everyone else.
Doris’ brothers and her sisters, and now her husband have gone on, and so have the friends from long ago and all the other follies girls have to love.
I miss my family.
I will admit I miss my family very much.
We were very close.
We had a lot of love for each other, shared.
And.
I miss them every day.
That's why once in a while, Doris comes back here to the archives room, where all the pictures and all the scrapbooks are kept.
The place where, in a way, her family lives on.
Oh, yes, they do.
They do.
I enjoy going back to the archives room and just sort of being with them.
But Doris Eaton, Travis, showgirl, college graduate, business woman, cannot stay still for long.
She still has her health and even a new dance partner.
My Chef loves show business, so I began to teach him a few dance steps, and he learned very quickly.
And he's become a very excellent social dancer.
So now he's my dance partner.
We go to the club on Friday nights with friends and the mill.
My chef is my dance partner.
So you time may march relentlessly on for all of us.
But it dances with Doris.


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