To Rene, A Devoted Ballroom Dancer, Editor And Friend Elita Sohmer Clayman

Tomorrow July 31, 2012 will be the last day the website known as the Rene Zgraggen site where all of the Alabama and adjoining states could find all the information going on daily, weekly, monthly and etc. all about ballroom dancing there was to know, will be shut down. Rene is retiring and he is due to be doing so because he worked hard on this site daily, to give everyone in that area all the news on dancing there was.

Rene is in his seventies, about a year older than Elita and he has worked hard at disseminating everything there was going on about ballroom for almost ten years. I started to write for him 2005 when he invited me to continue on my stories on dance that he had read in the dance magazine Amateur Dancers. I had written for them for fifteen years then and he proposed to me that I should join his site and I was quite honored. I chose the name Elita’s Corner and a column was born and it was written once a month for seven years this past February.

It has been an honor to write for him and to be published alongside of him monthly. I have written I guess about eighty-five to ninety articles and he accepted each one with grace and kindness.

Now Rene will no longer be editing a dance site and I wish him all the joy in his new activities. He will continue to ballroom dance and be involved in many aspects of it down in Montgomery, Alabama where he resides with his wife Janet.

He is a dear man, devoted to family, children and grandchildren and a lot to his favorite hobby and activity called ballroom. We all did this long before Dancing With The Stars became a reality show and many people thought ballroom dance had been reinvented.

We ballroom dancers knew it never went any place other than into our hearts and souls and to the bottom of our tired, sometimes, feet. We continued to do it week after week, month after month and year after year and when the show came on; non-dancers thought it was a new thing.

All of the dancers throughout the country, like Rene and I always continued to accomplish it and most of all to not only adore it, but to love it. It became a part of our lives along with family, home, work and happiness.

I thank you Rene for giving me the opportunity to state my thoughts on the sport we both love so much.

You have always been a gentleman, a gentle man and a strong man too. You always wrote about all the joys we had ballroom dancing and writing about it too.

You and I have never really met in person yet. Someday, in this lifetime, two seniors Rene and Elita and our spouses, Janet and Jerry will certainly meet and where will that be? At a dance somewhere in some city and we will say Hello and Happy to Meet You at last.

It has been my extreme happiness and joy to be a part of your site and may you be blessed with good health and every day a happy and joyous one.

Fondly from me   Elita Sohmer Clayman, Baltimore, Maryland