Many lives revolved around popular square-dance caller

Consider the square dance, that all-American spectacle of lively tunes. Picture the swirling petticoats and frisky dancers whirling and twirling to the squeals of a fiddle and the directions of a caller who is invariably male and whose patter combines the directiveness of a drill sergeant with the contagious rhythms of a rapper.

Born in rural America, with roots in the English country dance and the French quadrille, the square dance exploits the creative tension between precise and disciplined form and exuberant function.

And now consider Charlie Lee, a precise and disciplined man with a lifelong abundance of energy who found an outlet for both sides of his personality -- the discipline and the energy -- in square dancing.

Mr. Lee, 86, a Manassas resident who died of cancer Aug. 12, discovered the fun of promenading and do-si-doing in 1958, when he and his wife, Katie, were looking for a pastime they could enjoy together and not have to leave their five children at home.

"I took to it like a duck to water because of the music," Mr. Lee told The Washington Post last year. Growing up in rural North Carolina, he had been a guitar player ever since he and his two brothers bought a used guitar for $7 and taught themselves to play. He'd always loved country and bluegrass music. It was music made for square dancing.

His wife was just as enthusiastic. Plus, she was a better dancer, he said. Mr. Lee became a much-sought-after caller, directing teams of dancers through "unwrap the diamond" and "scoot and counter," among hundreds of calls and thousands of variations.

Within weeks of learning the basics, the Lees were teaching square dancing, first at Our Lady of Counsel Catholic Church in Vienna and then at schools, clubs and other churches across the area. They organized several clubs -- the Gay Notes (now the Merry Notes) of Vienna, Reel-a-Rounders in Alexandria and the Star Shooters in Fairfax.

Mr. Lee once estimated that he and Katie taught more than 2,000 square-dancers over the years.

"It's some of the most good, wholesome exercise a person can do," he said last year. "If you square-dance two hours a night, that's the equivalent of a five-mile walk."

Leave it to Charlie Lee to know such things. He was a lifelong fitness nut, three of his grown grandsons recalled one morning recently as they sat around a table at Brion's Grille in Fairfax. "He was always up at the crack of dawn, always doing something, whether it was mowing the lawn or working on cars," recalled grandson Charlie Cordle.

A small, wiry guy who liked to eat -- although you couldn't tell by looking at him -- he did a hundred push-ups as soon as he hopped out of bed every morning. During cancer therapy a few months before his death, a friend asked him whether he was still able to do his daily hundred. "No, I'm up to 50," he said.

For years, he worked as a personnel manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although the job could not begin to contain his diverse interests and his energy.