"Killer Joe" Piro

Frank "Killer Joe" Piro (2 March 1921 - 5 February 1989) was a dance instructor to high society and popularized steps of the discotheque era of the 1960s and 1970s. In the early fifties, he opened his own studio on 54 West 55th Street in Manhattan, where many in New York's high society came to take dance lessons. Over the decades he taught what would become the mainstays of the discothèque scene: the Mambo, the Cha-cha and the Merengue, then the Twist and later the Frug, the Frog, the Watusi, and the Hully Gully. His students included the Duke of Windsor, Sita Devi Gaekwar - Maharani of Baroda, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Ray Bolger, Luci Baines Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and, by 1965, more than a million other Americans via the Emmy award-winning TV show 'That Was the Week That Was.' His fame somehow spread far enough to be photographed by Richard Avedon and to inspire a Filipino guitar band, the Rocky Fellers, to record a tribute tune, "Killer Joe," for Scepter Records in 1963. The record earned the band a spot on the Top 40 pop charts for a few weeks, though it bears more than a passing similarity to the Mickey & Sylvia hit, "Love is Strange." Despite being the undisputed "King of the Discotheque," Piro never opened his own club. Asked why, he replied, "I like things the way they are. I don't want to be watching a cash register, watching the waiters - it would take all the beauty of dancing away from me and I would get old."