KILLER JOE PIRO ~ Pachanga dance instruction 8mm film (1961)

The Metro Mambo Collection happily shares this short 8mm silent Pachanga dance-instruction film featuring famed dance instructor "KILLER JOE" PIRO - the legendary emcee and mambo instructor at NYC's fabled Palladium Ballroom during the 50's and early-60's. The background music, "Ya Se Formo" from Hector Rivera's 1961 Epic LP "Charanga and Pachanga" has been added purely for entertainment purposes.

Shown with dancing partner Nadine Weiler, the film was presumably produced by the enterprising Piro who maintained a thriving dance instruction studio at 54 West 55th Street in Manhattan, teaching dancing to everyone from the Duke of Windsor to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Frank "Killer Joe" Piro (March 2, 1921 - February 5, 1989) was born in East Harlem, the son of an Italian tailor. Piro got hooked on dancing as a way to meet girls, and began frequenting the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in his late teens. The “Killer Joe” nickname comes from a supposed ability to wear out one partner after the other on the dance floor.

While serving with the US Navy in World War II, he won a National Jitterbug contest held at the 1942 Harvest Moon Ball, the prize being a transfer to Broadway's equivalent of the Hollywood Canteen, where his assignment was to dance with the likes of Kathryn Cornell and other stage stars.

After the war, Piro became the emcee and teacher at the Palladium Ballroom at 53rd Street and Broadway, opened in 1947 in response to the expanding popularity of Latin rhythms. Along with co-instructor Carmen Marie Padilla (nee: poet Carmen M. Pursifull), Piro found himself the 'ringmaster' at ground-zero of an international phenomenon in the early 1950's. Photographed in national magazines such as Life and Ebony, Piro is featured prominently in the 1954 musical short-subject 'Mambo Madness' (featuring Tito Rodriguez and his orchestra, dancers Cuban Pete Aguilar, Millie Donay, Marilyn Winters and other legendary Palladium dancers, that film was actually shot down the block at the Palm Ballroom, as owner Max Hyman did not allow filming at the Palladium).

Using his acclaim at the Palladium as a launching pad, Piro became an international celebrity during the early-1960's 'discotheque' phenomenon. As dance instructor to the jet-set,his students included the Duke of Windsor, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Ray Bolger, and Luci Baines Johnson. In 1965, he was profiled in the Emmy award winning TV show 'I Like Things The Way They Are.' Photographed by Richard Avedon, Piro was commissioned by Smirnoff to create a dance named for 'The Mule' cocktail, appearing in dozens of ads with the likes of Woody Allen and Julie Newmar. The guitar band, the Rocky Fellers even recorded a Top 40 tribute tune, "Killer Joe," for Scepter Records in 1963. Piro remained an active and popular presence on the New York dance scene until his death from kidney disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in 1989.

With a couple of rare exceptions, like the other posts on the 'Metro Mambo Channel' this is this film's first appearance on YouTube. To hear more from the "Metro Mambo" collection, tune-in for The Latin Flavor Classic Edition, on Washington DC's WPFW 89.3 FM, Live-streaming Sundays from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. EST on www.WPFWFM.ORG