Rosie Radiator: NorCal Tap Dance Guru, Dead at 78

We were saddened to hear of the death last week of the northcoast’s most famous tap dancer “Rosie Radiator” (aka Bess Bair) at the age of 78 in Florida where she had retired for family reasons a couple of years ago.

Born in Arcata in 1946, Rosie lived on Poonkinney Road in Dos Rios for years while maintaining a dance studio in San Francisco (part-time) and Willits. 

Described by Smithsonian Magazine as “San Francisco’s Tap Dance Guru,” Rosie gained national attention in 1976 when she tap-danced across the Golden Gate Bridge in honor of her famous dancing grandmother’s passing. She went on to establish several Guinness Book of World Records records for long-distance tap dancing with her students and fans. 

When Rosie tap-danced across the Golden Gate Bridge in 1976 she proclaimed it the first World Tap Dance Day and a tradition of long distance tap dancing was born which she lead until her retirement from long-distance tap dancing in the mid-2000s.

Rosie said she was never interested in establishing a solo long distance record because, she said that it seemed that it would be practically unverifiable. "Who is to say what constitutes actual tap dancing?”, she asked. “Someone running along with taps on their tennis shoes could be considered tap dancing and who would be the judge?"

When her famous tap-dancing grandmother from the 1920s died several weeks after her 1976 Golden Gate Bridge performance, she was buried with a picture of Rosie dancing across the bridge in her honor. 

It was in her lively spirit that Tap Dance Day in San Francisco was established. “I am proud to say that the tradition has continued,” Bair said years later. 

“I knew my grandmother wanted to celebrate tap dancing,” Rosie said, “but how could I connect with the people she had known and been so close to?” After a visit with her grandmother shortly before her death, “I pondered that question as I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge. Suddenly her words came to me. ‘Say it with your dancing…’ and I knew what I had to do. … You were right grandma, I said it with my dancing and people understood.”

Rosie was a close friend of the late Judi Bari going all the way back to the late 1980s, and once told us that when she was living in San Francisco in 1990, she was the first person to visit Judi Bari in her hospital bed after Bari was nearly killed in the famous May 1990 car bombing in Oakland. Bair said that Bari immediately named Mike Sweeney as the bomber, but later reversed her public position to blame a mysterious conspiracy of Big Timber, the FBI or agents thereof to protect her parental rights and, later, to as basis for a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland Police for false arrest.

In the early 2000s Bair lead a group of Poonkinney Road residents who opposed a gravel operation proposed by a Dos Rios couple further up the road. Bair was unfairly accused of being against the gravel operation. But that wasn’t true. She and her neighbors objected to the permit because the County refused to improve the road and eliminate several dangerous blind curves that the gravel trucks would be driving over. 

Rosie was harrased by some north county neighbors including some members of the County road crew during that dispute Rosie wrote at the time: “Only last week I went to the feed store and saw an anonymous petition stating that our coalition wants to stop the county road crew from doing their work and close the Poonkinney road and close down the gravil mining operation. This lie is an attempt to scare the local people and nothing is farther from the truth. The truth is that these huge quarry trucks (one every 20 minutes according to the permit application) will destroy the road and make for very dangerous traffic. We need the road crew to keep the road open so we can live here. The only reason the road crew is involved in this situation is that a relative of quarry guy was forced by the County to resign from the crew because he was using his job to harass us.”

After considerable delays and court proceedings, the couple who proposed the gravel operation died and the issue evaporated.

Rosie and her fellow dancers were frequent performers on the streets of San Francisco where they entertained local and visiting audiences countless times with their fancy, polished and perfectly timed dance stylings. She even performed at the Anderson Valley Variety Show in 2017, still lively in her glittery tap shoes at the age of 71, described by Variety Show reviewer Jerry Karp as “riveting” (perhaps a reference to her name) and “she even made us laugh with her dry wit that topped the act.”

A San Francisco tap dance colleague said, “Rosie's tap dance adventures and pioneering discoveries have changed the world of tap forever.”

In one of her letters Rosie concluded, “You know I'd rather be tap dancing.” We’d like to think that will be her epitaph.