Submitted photo In the 1970s, Fuzzy Palumbo of Youngstown was known as “Mr. Elastic” for his dancing style.

YOUNGSTOWN — Youngstown in the 1970s was populated by a colorful cast of characters that even Martin Scorsese would be challenged to match. Few made a more lasting impression than dancer and dance instructor Fuzzy Palumbo.

Dubbed “Mr. Elastic” by Lou Tiberio, owner of the Tropics, Palumbo was flamboyantly and unashamedly gay decades before it became fashionable. With his oversized afro and long, lithe limbs, he was the real Rubber Band Man — a one-man episode of “Dancing with the Stars.”

In Youngstown, Fuzzy Palumbo was a star.

Palumbo’s romance with dance began while he was but a tyke at Sacred Heart School on the city’s East Side.

“I was only 10 or 11 years old when I saw Shirley Temple and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson dance together on that spiral staircase in ‘The Little Colonel,'” Palumbo said. “That’s what made me want to dance.”

In what seemed like a premonition, Palumbo’s mother chose to name her son after a mythological Greek warrior known in legend for his feet — Achilles.

“People would mock me for it,” Palumbo said. “‘Hey, how’s your tendon? You want me to hang you by your heels?’ Stuff like that. I had big ears. I was tall and very skinny, too, so I was bullied a lot. But that gave me energy. By the time I entered East High School, nobody messed around with me anymore.”

Dancing, he knew, would be his passport to acceptance.

So flexible that he appeared to be double-jointed, Palumbo’s first opportunity to show his stuff came at age 15. He entered a Twist contest at the Elm’s Ballroom and won. This led eventually to his first paying gig at Fred Astaire Dance Studio.

This was when he came to be known as “Fuzzy.”

“I met a crazy man named Chris Christie who ran Fred Astaire’s. He thought I would make a good teacher. I taught there for about a year. By then, I was working just about every bar in the city, the most famous being the Tropics.”

Palumbo had by then developed a personal style that attracted attention wherever he went.

“The attention was good,” he said. “But there were a lot of phonies, too. Men always wanted to talk to me just to see if they could get to the girls who danced with me. On the other hand, a lot of the men in the bars would buy me drinks because their wives wanted to meet me. And I would honor that.”

It was obvious to these men, of course, that Palumbo was no threat. In a rough-and-tumble city of mobsters and mill workers during an unenlightened era, one might not expect that an openly gay man like Palumbo would enjoy such respect.

“People respected me for who I was. They felt honored to be in my presence, honored for me to be in their restaurant. I rarely had to pay for a meal.”

Palumbo possessed not only the gift of dance, but also the rare gift of making money at it. He was everywhere. The Alibi Bar. The Holiday Bowl. The Green. And, of course, the Tropics.

Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, he worked with numerous dance troupes and partners in countless shows at schools, shopping malls and charitable events,

Palumbo reached his full glory during the disco era. Disco was made for Fuzzy Palumbo. Palumbo taught thousands of area baby boomers the fine points of disco dancing, and he was well-paid for it.

Taking his show on the road to California and Florida, he showed up as an unknown one night at the famous Castaways in Miami Beach. After the band allowed him to dance on stage with them during their set, the owner asked him, “What do you do for a living?”

Palumbo responded, “You’ve just seen it,”

“Well, you’ve got a job and you can start tomorrow night.”

In the mid-’80s, Palumbo met a woman named Jackie Diamond who ran a nursing home on Market Street.

“Jackie was actually a man who became a woman,” Palumbo said, “Her activity director had been in a car accident. She asked me to come visit with her residents. I did. She told me, ‘You’d be good at this,’ and offered me the job.”

Summer was Palumbo’s slow season. Kids were out of school and on vacation. Families were busy. He had closed his dance school for two months. He took the job.

It would become his lifelong second career.

“I met my significant other, Randy, at that time. He was moving to Baltimore, so I moved with him. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I enjoyed working at the nursing home. I looked back on my life as a dancer in a positive way. I got to see the world, I got paid to dance. Maybe it was time to try something else.”

Thirty years later, after a long and fulfilling career in the Baltimore nursing home industry, caring for people as he always has, Palumbo and Randy decided it was time to come home. He returns to a far different city than the city he left.

“I never had to deal with homophobia when I was young. I was open about it. I took that chance and for me, it was a chance well worth taking,” he said. “It’s sad today because in Maryland, on the average, once a week a transgender is killed. In some ways, it’s far more difficult to be LGBTQ today than it was then.”

A couple of weeks ago, Palumbo attended the Greater Youngstown Italian Fest. It was his first public appearance at home in more than 30 years. He smiled about it.

“I ran into so many people who knew and remembered me. I was shocked to learn that I died from AIDS 10 years ago. That was printed in a paper somewhere, or so I was told. ‘You look good for a corpse’ the guy said.”

Palumbo is still fondly remembered by thousands of Youngstown baby boomers, not only for his dancing but also his kindness and consideration. “He had a generous spirit,” one Facebook commentator wrote upon learning that Palumbo had come home.

Of his work with dementia patients at the nursing home, Palumbo said, “When you work with people like that, you always work in a circle. You work in a circle because communication goes and comes around in a circle.”

At long last back at home along with Randy, for Achilles “Fuzzy” Palumbo, life itself has now come full circle.

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