Howard Sims

Howard "Sandman" Sims (January 24, 1917 – May 20, 2003) was an African-American tap dancer who began his career in vaudeville.

He was skilled in a style of dancing that he performed in a wooden sandbox of his own construction, and acquired his nickname from the sand he sprinkled to alter and amplify the sound of his dance steps.

"They called the board my Stradivarius," Sims said of his sandbox.

Sims was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on January 24, 1917, one of 12 children.

The family soon relocated to Los Angeles, California, where he was raised.

Describing his childhood, Sims said, "It was just a whole big dancing family."

He learned to dance from his father, and said he was dancing as soon as he could walk.

He began tap-dancing at the age of 3.

He attributed some of his early love for tap dancing in particular to his mother, exasperated that he kept wearing out the toes of his shoes, putting steel taps on the shoes.

Along with his brothers, Sims was dancing on the sidewalks of Los Angeles from a young age.

At the age of 14, peeping in the windows of a dance school got Sims arrested for loitering, but he was able to dance his way to freedom, convincing a judge that his reason for being on that street was legitimate.

As a young man, despite his dance talent, Sims aspired to be not a professional dancer, but a professional boxer.

After twice breaking his hand, he decided he needed a different means of making a living.

Sims had noticed that boxing audiences reacted positively to the way he would dance in the rosin box before getting into the ring, and especially to the distinctive sound his dancing made moving the rosin granules around the wooden box.

He began to consider dancing as a career alternative.

Sims experimented with several different methods of reproducing the rosin box effect, gluing sandpaper to either his shoes or his dancing mat, but the sandpaper created too much wear on the other surface.

Finally he found the solution: loose sand in a low-lipped box.

The culture of street dancing in the 1920s has been compared to the rise of break dancing six decades later.

As the journal Jump Cut described it, "'challenge dancing,' in which each performer tries to outdo the other, is part of tap dancing's heritage, something like the jazz solos in which musicians try to outshine one another."

Sims later described how the atmosphere of these dance challenges was at least as much collegial as combative, and how dancers learned from one another in what became essentially "open air dance schools".

Despite performing at various vaudeville venues, Sims found neither fame nor success as a dancer in Los Angeles.

"People went for the scraping sound ... So I made a sound board by sprinkling sand on a flat platform. That was in 1935."

His sandbox remained his trademark throughout his career, with some venues even telling Sims, "If you don't bring your sandbox, don't come at all."

During this period, it was common for dancers to carry tap shoes with them and, when they encountered another dancer on the street, throw down their shoes by way of challenge.

In 1947, he tagged along on one of his professional-boxer friend Archie Moore's cross-country drives, and settled in New York City.

After arriving in Harlem, Sims began performing on the street as he had done in California, but faced stiff competition from other innovative dancers: "I knew people who danced on dinner plates. ... There was a man who could dance on newspapers without tearing them. And another who constructed a gigantic xylophone to tap on."

He performed on corners in between working whatever jobs he could find, and then discovered the "Amateur Night" stage on Wednesdays at the Apollo Theater, where he soon gained local notoriety.

He eventually won the Amateur Night competition a record-breaking 25 times, after which a rule was instituted that performers could no longer compete once they had earned four first prizes.

"When big name dancers played The Apollo, there was nothing in the audience but dancers with their shoes,' said Sandman Sims. 'Up in the balcony dancers, and the first six rows, you saw nothing but tap-dancers, want-to-be tap-dancers, gonna-be tap-dancers, tried-to-be tap-dancers. That's the reason a guy would want to dance at The Apollo."

From the 1950s to the year 2000, Sims was a regular attraction—a "fixture" —at Harlem's noted Apollo Theater, comedically ushering failed acts offstage with a hook, broom or other prop.

He was also involved in New York City's Hoofers Club, a venue primarily for black tap dancers.

By the mid-1950s, he had been hired as the Apollo's stage manager, and soon began his role as the Apollo's famed "executioner", chasing Amateur Night contestants the crowd disapproved of off the stage with a shepherd's crook (known since vaudeville times as "the hook") a broom, or other props, while dressed in a variety of wacky costumes, whether long underwear, a clown suit, or even a diaper.

Backstage, however, he would console defeated contestants with the story of his having been booed off ten times before he finally got to finish his own act.

In her review of the play based on his life, New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote, "Sims is a virtuoso among virtuosos—in a class by himself. To say Mr. Sims dances on sand is like saying Philippe Petit [the French high wire who gained fame from his illegal walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974] is a tightrope walker."

As part of the resurgence of interest in tap dancing in the 1980s, Sandman Sims served as a cultural ambassador, representing the United States with dance performances around the world.

He was featured in the 1989 dance film Tap, along with Sammy Davis Jr., Gregory Hines and Savion Glover, demonstrating classic challenge dancing.

Sims played "executioner" until 1989, when he departed to California to film "Tap" (he was replaced by James Brown impersonator C. P. Lacey), although one obituary says he stayed on until shortly after Time Warner took over the Apollo in 1999.

Having found work dancing did not stop him from dancing on the street, however.

"If I saw a dancer, I'd challenge him. I didn't care who it was. The way to get known in New York was to be the best. That's what I strived to be."

Sims also appeared in a 1990 episode of The Cosby Show as Rudy's tap dancing teacher, facing off against Cliff (Bill Cosby) in a good-natured tap challenge.