When Jean Dahlinger was 5 years old, she was so thin that the doctor suggested dancing lessons to build her strength. The $5 fee for each lesson was a sacrifice, but her mother made sure she got them. She learned tap, ballet, “every kind of dancing.” Her health flourished, and her dance skills had an unexpected benefit. When she was 15, they became a lifeline for her family.

It was 1929, the Great Depression had just hit, and her father, stricken with osteomyelitis, couldn’t work. The family lived in Los Angeles, where vaudeville producers Fanchon and Marco put out a call for dancers. “I wasn’t even driving,” recalls Dahlinger, now 94 and living at ABHOW’s Tahoe Senior Plaza community in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. “My father took me down. There must have been 200 girls waiting for a chance at a job.”

Beautiful and accomplished after ten years of lessons, Dahlinger landed a spot in a traveling show. For two years, she would support her family on the $60 a week she earned.

But first, she had to go home and get her mother’s permission. “She said, ‘If I didn’t know you, I wouldn’t let you go. But you know right from wrong.’”

Dahlinger proved worthy of that confidence. “You learn when you’re traveling just to say no,” she says. “‘Do you want a cigarette?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you want to go out for a drink?’ ‘No.’ I had good training from my mother.”

She also had a whole lot of fun. The show traveled mostly by train – one railcar carried nothing but scenery, she recalls – and did a different show in a different town each week. They started in New York City and worked their way through the South and back to California, playing fine theaters and staying at fine hotels. Each show included four or five acts tailored to that week’s theme.

“There might be a monkey act or a clown,” Dahlinger says. “There’d be a couple of very beautiful singers. We worked with Burns and Allen, a lot of the big stars.”

She herself did tap dancing, toe dancing and sometimes acrobatics as part of a faux-sister act with her girlfriend, Sue. The pair enjoyed performing – and they enjoyed the free Sundays they spent sightseeing.

“I’m so happy I had those years,” Dahlinger says. “Everybody in the show took care of me because I was the youngest. It was a wonderful experience.” And, she says, “I was happy I could help my folks when I did.”

Once her father recovered and she came home, she continued to work as a dancer until she married a theatrical agent in San Francisco and they started a family. Her husband died in 1971, and 15 years ago, she moved to Lake Tahoe.

“I love where I live,” she says with characteristic exuberance. “I’ve had a very happy life and a very healthy life. I was never sick, never even a headache.” Maybe that long-ago doctor was right.