Mastering The Dance Of Life Tommy Rosario Doesn’t Take Retirement Sitting Down

The kid in Tommy Rosario never died.

If he acted his age, Rosario says he’d be cooped up in a nursing home, watching baseball games on the tube and playing bingo at night.

Rosario prefers a more vibrant nightlife.

At 88, Rosario loves to groove to music.

“I dance anything,” Rosario says, smiling. “I can do samba, mambo, ballroom, anything.”

He wipes away his contagious smile with a quick sweep of a hand across his face. But it always comes back, taking over his face, making him look younger.

Rosario is roaring through retirement with little more than a good pair of shoes and some slick duds. He lives each day like an emergency.

“He’s got all this nervous energy,” says his wife, Margaret Rosario, 69. “He can’t sit still.”

Rosario dances four nights a week at various spots, including the Peking North, the Elks, and the Eagles. His friends, meanwhile, have slowed down. They’re in retirement homes and many of them have lost their memories.

The only thing Rosario lost is some hearing, and maybe a pound or two from all that dancing.

The 5-foot-tall, 120-pound man is so small he disappears once he shuffles onto the dance floor.

Every Friday and Saturday night, he hangs out with “the younger crowd” (the 30-somethings and up) at the Peking North on North Division, one of his favorite dance spots.

“The young people, they can’t dance,” Rosario says. “They just jump up and down and make noise.”

Rosario can’t jump. He just sways his arms, twirls a few times, and bends his arthritic knees to the beat of country rock.

People shout “Hey, Tommy!” across the dance floor. Rosario whips around, offers a big smile and waves. He’s the man of the hour.

“He really knows how to have a good time,” says a friend named “Bob,” who’s got tattoos up and down his bulky arms.

The 60-ish man has known Rosario for about five years. He sometimes feels envious.

“He’s broke 500 hearts here,” Bob says, glancing at the dance floor. “Seems like every time I see a pretty girl, he’s already got her.”

Margaret Rosario isn’t too concerned about her husband’s lifestyle. The pair have been married more than 50 years. She trusts him. The only thing she worries about is the fact that he still drives, jumping curbs and cruising too close to the edge, she says.

“Oh, I tell ya, I think I’m going to die when I go with him,” she says, laughing.

The only sign of age is on Tommy Rosario’s face, where wrinkles map out a history of hard work and nearly a half-century of chasing the “American Dream.”

Rosario’s parents sold part of their family’s farm in the Philippines so he could come to the States and get an education. The only one in his family of five who left his homeland, Rosario got to Spokane in 1926.

His wife and children, Tom, 44, and Roberto, 36, say Rosario has always been a busy-body. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when he juggled three or four jobs, there was no time to enjoy life.

“He didn’t have a lot of fun when he was growing up because he worked so much,” says Tom Rosario, Jr.

Dad was gone by the time his children woke up in the morning, and still at work by their bedtime, Tom Jr. recalls.

Tommy Rosario teeters on the edge of a chair as he talks about his early life in America. He shifts often, gestures with his arms, a man in constant motion.

Rosario carried his work ethic from the Philippines to his new life in America. He raced around for years at the Davenport Hotel as a busboy, housekeeper and dishwasher, at times working 15-hour days.

“I wanted to get ahead,” Rosario says. “That’s how I got this house. That’s how I put my kids through school.”

He later got a job as a bartender at the Spokane Country Club, mixing drinks and mingling with the city’s rich and famous for about 40 years. He remembers that job the most.

“I like people,” Rosario says. “I met a lot of people working behind the bar.”

His family can attest to that.

“He’s so friendly and outgoing,” says Tom Rosario, Jr. “When you meet my dad, you don’t ever forget him.”

Margaret Rosario says there’s never a day when the couple walk downtown or go to the grocery store without being stopped by someone who knows her husband.

“He likes everybody, and everybody likes him,” she says. “Someone always recognizes him.”

Despite his years as a bartender, Rosario doesn’t drink or smoke. When he’s out on the town, he has the usual: coffee with cream and sugar, or water.

“I’m glad I never got into smoking and drinking,” Rosario says. “It keeps me healthy.”

Sometimes Rosario’s active ways get to be too much for his wife, who says she can’t keep up.

“We almost got a divorce over the cha, cha, cha,” says Margaret Rosario, remembering a time when the pair was learning new dances and she was too tired to move. “There’s no peace, no quiet moment.”

She’s grown accustomed to a vigorous spouse.

She used to go dancing, too, but stopped a few years ago when she says her “body slowed down.”

“I can’t stay out that late anymore,” she says.

When he’s not dancing, Tommy Rosario rests for his next excursion onto the dance floor or gardens.

At the Rosarios’ north Spokane home, multi-colored tulips brighten the front yard and petunias line the backyard.

Rosario’s clothes that day, a red turtle-neck underneath a yellow sweater, outdo the colors of the flowers, which sway in a light breeze like the way he dances.

“You have to keep moving,” Rosario says. “It keeps me alive.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo