Typhoid fever to hip hop: Pensacola’s oldest dance studio closes after 94 years

Little Bernice Miller was struck with typhoid fever when she was only 7 years old, and because it was the Roaring 20s, she was given a prescription to dance! Seriously. The little Pensacola girl’s doctor sent her to dance school for therapy. She learned ballet, though tap would become the dance she loved most, and in 1929, at the age of 11, she began teaching dance to neighborhood children and adults and Bernice’s Dance Studio was born. Her first professional class she taught, still 11, was just adults. Bernice would teach all her life, leaving a legacy of dance through her instruction to generations of young Pensacolians. One of her students was her daughter, Starr Burlingame, who would take over her mother’s studio adding “Starrstep” to the name, when she passed in 1989 at the age of 71. Only now has that original prescription, born from a child’s illness, expired. Bernice’s Starrstep Dance Studio closed shop in early June with its last recital, “Take A Bow.” “There were a lot of tears,” said Starr Burlingame, a lifelong dance educator who, besides leading the studio since 1989, also taught at Pensacola Junior College ‒ now Pensacola State College ‒ and currently...