Shirley Beshears with some of her Southern Starlets students (Photo courtesy Shirley Beshears)
CULLMAN – On Tuesday, July 17, Southern Starlets Baton and Dance Studio Founder/Owner Shirley Byrd Beshears posted a heartbreaking message for her students and friends on Facebook, excerpts of which appear below:
“Friends, after 35 years I am sad to announce that due to my severe health problems I am retiring and closing the studio . . . It has been a blessing and an honor to serve this wonderful community for 35 years. Everyone has a God given talent and mine was teaching baton. I have spent the last 46 years of my life sharing my talent with 1000s of other young ladies. I have been so honored to be a part of their lives and watch them live their dreams thru twirling and dancing. The lifelong friends I have made thru these years and all of the many many sweet memories that were made will never be forgotten. Southern Starlets last class was last night. It was a fire baton class so I guess we are ended on a hot note. The time has come for me to put my health and my family first for the first time in 35 years. Thank you my Facebook Friends and Families for all of your support and prayers thru the years.”
Beshears revealed that she had been diagnosed almost three years ago with aplastic anemia, a blood and bone marrow disorder.
The Mayo Clinic’s website offers the following explanation of the disease:
Aplastic anemia is a condition that occurs when your body stops producing enough new blood cells. Aplastic anemia leaves you feeling fatigued and with a higher risk of infections and uncontrolled bleeding.
A rare and serious condition, aplastic anemia can develop at any age. Aplastic anemia may occur suddenly, or it can occur slowly and get worse over a long period of time. Treatment for aplastic anemia may include medications, blood transfusions or a stem cell transplant, also known as a bone marrow transplant.
Aplastic anemia develops when damage occurs to your bone marrow, slowing or shutting down the production of new blood cells. Bone marrow is a red, spongy material inside your bones that produces stem cells, which give rise to other cells. Stem cells in the bone marrow produce blood cells — red cells, white cells and platelets. In aplastic anemia, the bone marrow is described in medical terms as aplastic or hypoplastic — meaning that it's empty (aplastic) or contains very few blood cells (hypoplastic).
In her Facebook post, Beshears wrote, “In March due to some unexpected disappointments and losing our house to the hail storm my numbers bottomed out. I had to do a lot of praying to God to help me find some calm. The next week my numbers did go up but then four weeks ago they dropped again. I realized that what I needed was to spend time with my friends and family and get totally out of the studio.”
The Tribune talked with Beshears to learn more about her long career and how things are going for her.
Getting out of the studio was no simple task for Beshears. She has been twirling the baton since she was an eighth grader at West Point in 1968 and has been teaching since she graduated in 1972. She opened Southern Starlets in Tarrant in 1983, relocating to her hometown, Cullman, a few months later.
Said Beshears, “God gives everybody a talent. Now, some people choose not to use that talent, but I’ve said all my life this is the talent He gave me, and He gave me the know-how to teach it. I’ve loved it.”
Beshears described the beginning of Southern Starlets:
“We had moved from Cullman to Center Point, and I was teaching some little classes over there for the rec center. And we had to march in a parade; so we were going to march in a parade and we needed a name, and we didn’t have a name–and I’m very patriotic–so I named them Southern Starlets. Love my red, white and blue! So that’s how we got the Southern Starlets name.
“And then, about six months later, I started the organization in Cullman. I opened up a studio, if you want to call it (that). I was teaching in the back room of Tony’s School of Music when I first started in Cullman.”
Beshears estimated that, over the years, Southern Starlets trained between 1,500 and 2,000 students. Along the way, she routinely went out of her way to help her teams: loading kids in her van and driving them to competitions when their parents couldn’t take them, feeding kids breakfast on competition days when parents dropped them off at her house on their way to work, and driving as far as Birmingham to fetch students for class.
Said Beshears, “Do what you’ve got to do. My motto is ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’ If you got the will, I’ll find the way!”
More than 50 former Southern Starlets have gone on to twirl or dance at the collegiate level, and at least one has been an NFL cheerleader. The current Auburn University majorette instructor is a former student, as well as both the majorette and danceline instructors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her daughter, Candy Byrd Miller, who twirled at the University of Georgia and traveled as a “twirling ambassador” to France and Peru (with Kristin Allred and Stacy Hester), headed up the UGA color guard, majorettes, and danceline for eight years and now owns her own studio near the university.
“I’ve had some really good kids,” said Beshears. “I mean, I really have. You know what–your teacher’s only so much; I can only do so much. Got to have some talent for the girl to succeed, and I’ve had some really talented girls come through; (I’ve) been blessed!”
Southern Starlets has won 17 national and open world championships, starting in 1989, and racked up many other honors going all the way back to the earliest days. During the first 10 years she was teaching, Beshears had no studio, so she gave trophies to her students to take home. From 1983 on, she began displaying the honors in her Cullman studios. This last week, she began giving those away as well. After three days of distributing trophies and plaques to former students who wanted them, and after the loss of more than 100 trophies to damage during the 2011 tornado, Beshears still had almost 600 trophies lined up on her studio floor.
Medical condition
Aplastic anemia, according to Beshears’ physicians, can be aggravated by stress, and she suffered dangerously low platelet and white blood cell counts in March due to work stress and the loss of her house. After rising to low but reasonably safe levels, they fell again in early July.
Beshears described her immune system as “very compromised,” but she has been able to remain free from of infections that could be particularly dangerous to someone in that condition.
“God’s just helped me,” said Beshears. “Really, He’s kept me in the best condition that I could be. But everybody’s like ‘How do you not get sick?’ I’m going, ‘God knows I couldn’t handle it.’
According to her physicians, the rest and relaxation of retirement should help her significantly.
Giving up the Starlets
Beshears stated, “I’ve had a good 35 years, and I’ve had some of the most wonderful families. I’ve made some lifelong friends that are just amazing. I’ve got boxes full of thank you cards that come from the girls that graduated, some that went on to go to college, got good careers. And they thanked me; their moms thanked me for instilling (values) in them. It helped them through life: the values that I’ve tried to instill in them.
“And one of them is commitment. Commitment is very important, because if you can’t commit to your team, the team’s no good.
“So, it’s been good. Like I said, I had a good run. But it’s time to say goodbye now.”
What do you want people to remember about Southern Starlets?
“We strived for excellence. That was the whole thing we did at our studios; we strived for excellence. If you were going to do it, you needed to do it full-out.
“We were always trying to be a positive program, couldn’t always pull it off, but we really tried. Teaching the girls how to be teammates and pull together. Winning was not all there was to it. No, I want everybody to remember that here we strived for excellence, but it wasn’t all just about winning that trophy. It was about being part of a team.
“I shared my passion. Every recital, I would always thank my moms in the little program, thanking them for allowing me to pass down my passion for the twirling, to share that with their daughters.”
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