Jerry Roscoe’s wife, Joan, taught him how to polka and, on their wedding day, he delightedly danced with her in front of a huge gathering of close friends and family members.
It all started when Jerry’s parents booked the Kryger Brothers, the best polka band in Pennsylvania, for the wedding.
But while Jerry Roscoe avoided holding up the wall at his wedding, his passion for dancing was held back for a while as he started working at IBM.
Though, Roscoe’s profession is electrical engineering, his passion for dancing is ever-undaunted. He graduated from the University of Detroit after completing a two-year degree from the University of Scranton.
The University of Detroit, a co-op engineering school, had students attend class for three months, then work for three months.
Roscoe was working as a stock boy in between the two universities when he got a call from IBM, so he shuffled back and forth between IBM and school and different types of engineering work.
After graduating, he was invited to work at IBM as a circuit design engineer, and later on, went on to work for several departments.
He worked at IBM Endicott in New York. At that time the company was making mid-range, mid-frame computer systems. He also contributed to an IBM-developed system, which required an expert to be able to define the rules to perform a particular task for the configuration of a new mid-range computer system called 93-70.
His work on AI was accepted, and he presented their work at a conference in England.
Roscoe also has a U.S. patent in his name for his part of a logic design within a computer, work that he did at IBM.
During all this time, he was distanced from Polka and his passion for dancing. He and his wife didn’t dance again until after their three children had grown up.
Then, after many years, one day, the Village of Collier resident saw a polka band playing nearby. The Roscoes spied a couple doing some neat moves, so they approached them for lessons.
There onwards, they got heavily indulged in couples country and western dance. One country and western bar held a dance contest, which the Roscoes won, and got to perform at a Reba McEntire concert.
A later contest got them onstage with country and pop singer Kenny Rogers, which was the highlight of their professional career.
The couple participated in various workshops and competed. As part of the retirement package from IBM, Jerry was offered a couple thousand dollars for people to train in a second career.
Next stop…… dance studio for ballroom dance lessons. Some of their students even reported being called by the cruise line.
The Roscoes went on to participate in dance activities with a dance instructor on board a transatlantic cruise.
That’s when the couple said “Hmm. We could do this.”
“It wasn’t that easy, though. It turned out the acceptance criteria was tougher than getting a job with IBM,” Roscoe said. “First off, you had to be a couple. Easy enough. The rest? Not so much. Do you have any professional references? How about student ones? Have you won any competitions or awards? Where did you train?”
– Attributed Source, The Villages Daily Sun