KALONA

“I made it all the way around the world by the time I was 21.  That was what I wanted to do,” Janet Haberman Long says as she sorts through boxes of dance costumes, framed photos, and memorabilia at the Kalona Historical Village. 

Now entering her eighth decade, Long, who has been a dancer since age 5, is the subject of a new exhibit commemorating her impressive career.

The Mid-Prairie graduate’s life as a professional dancer began after she completed a year of college, as her parents requested.  Then she joined a dance troupe in Florida that performed internationally, first in Costa Rica and then beyond.  By the time she retired from the troupe five years later, she had visited 43 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.   

Once home, relaxing with her extended family at their cabins in Colorado, she met Robert, the man who would quickly become her husband.

“I always told him he was in the right place at the right time,” she says.  “I was ready to settle down.”

For Long, settling down meant renting the basement of Farmers Savings Bank in Kalona and opening a dance studio where she taught classes.  Eventually she and her husband built a house in Iowa City and moved the studio there, where kids learned to dance on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

For 43 years she taught dance. 

“I had them stay with me [from] preschool through high school,” she says, which allowed her to see her students literally grow up.  Having shared so much of their lives, she had “a good relationship with all of my kids.  I keep in touch with so many of them.”

Many of her students went on to tour, such as with state fairs, and others went on to teach dance themselves.

That Long had such a successful career shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; it seems to be in her genes.  Her brother worked on the first Apollo mission to the moon, and her dad started the original Kalona Creamery and Kalona Old Fashioned Ice Cream Bars.

She retired from teaching in 2015, but she has not stopped dancing.  She gets out her tap records, puts on her tap shoes, and practices in the basement. 

I’m not one that can just sit around,” she says.

Costumes, playbills, t-shirts, and much more from Long’s decades of teaching and dancing are on display at the Kalona Historical Village’s Visitor Center, 715 D Ave., Kalona.  Current hours are Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.