Tap-dancing teenager knocked ’em dead

In a Sept. 2, 1939 review of George White’s “Scandals of 1939,” a Broadway critic reserved his highest praise for a teenager from Texas named Ann Miller, who stopped the show every night with her high-energy tap dance.

The future fixture of Hollywood musicals in the 1930s and 1940s was born Lucille Ann Collier at her grandparent’s place near Nacogdoches.  The year was 1923, and that is important because she would later change it to find work in Tinsel Town.  

 Her disappointed father, who had his heart set on a son, insisted upon calling her Johnnie, and the rest of the family went along. She was just three years old, when her mother Clara bought her dance lessons to strengthen tiny legs weakened by rickets.