ARTHUR BELL: A Dancer Lost & Found - tribute to African American dancer Arthur Bell who was homeless until Mar 1998 when a social worker helped him rediscover his routes with the New York City Ballet

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1999 by Doris Perlman

After these recollections, Bell's memory fails him, and he has been unable to fill in most of the subsequent gaps in his life story. In due course he returned to New York City, apparently too old for dancing engagements, and worked at a variety of low-level clerical and administrative jobs. He was a food service worker at Creedmoor Psychiatric Institute in Queens from 1967 to 1972; an office assistant with the City Department of Transportation from 1973 to 1980; and a typist, clerk, and receptionist with the City Human Resources Administration from 1982 until 1992. Somewhere along the line he became homeless, although he does not remember how or why.

Bell was able to meet with various family members after his story appeared in the New York Times. After a Tampa paper ran an Associated Press article about him, his sister Patricia was asked by a deacon of her church if she had seen the news, and within a short time Bell was reunited with his five sisters and his one surviving brother (two others had died). When the Actors Fund home offered him a residency, he felt truly blessed to be among fellow artists. He even danced a little--this time for joy.

Doris Perlman is Web site editor of Dance Magazine.