Mary Snyder
Glen Gardner, NJ
Mary Snyder has had a love for dancing all her life, square dancing (traditional) three times a week as a teenager, and always trying to tap dance (still trying as a member of the Happy Tappers, Hunterdon County's senior tap group).
In 1970 Mary formed a 4-H square dance club for her children and remained the leader for 14 years. As leader of The Hayshakers, she and the 4-H’s learned Modern Western square dancing from Art Seele, father of Betsy Gotta. The Hayshakers entered two to four sets of square dancers in the 4-H Square Dance Competition at the Flemington Fair every year.
Mary first saw clogging, around 1976, and it was love at first sight, but the closest clogging group was one and one half hours away. She would have to wait until 1988 before she was able to travel to south Jersey to dance with the Rainbow Cloggers and then later with the Blue Ribbon Cloggers of Hillside, NJ. In the mean while, she found a book “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Clogging And Never Even Knew You Wanted To Ask, by Sheila Popwell and taught herself a few basic steps.
When she and another clogger danced a clogging demo at a square dance, people from Bachelor and Bachelorettes Square Dance Club in Bethlehem, PA, approached them to teach clogging in their area. A one-hour clogging teach was set up in January of 1990, between square dance classes. That was the beginning of The Lehigh Valley Cloggers, who celebrated their 16th anniversary in 2006.
Mary earned her CCI, (Certified Clogging Instructor) at the National Clogging Convention in Las Vegas in November of 2003. She has taught clogging at the Up and Rising Instructors at the National Clogging Convention, the Northeast Clogging Convention, five National Square Dance Conventions and New Jersey and West Virginia Square Dance Conventions.