Nell A. Hamling’s house was a house divided.
At one end of the home was a makeshift dance studio that doubled at times as a space for the North Aurora resident to teach children acrobatics. At the other end of the house was the family’s baby grand piano, where hundreds of students learned to play by practicing musical scales over and over.
The rest of the house is where for years Mrs. Hamling, her husband and four children lived, family members said.
“Ours was the house in town that everyone knew,” said her daughter Karen Wake, laughing. “There were partitions everywhere and at any given point during the day, there’d be dozens of students coming in and out our front door. It was pretty chaotic, but somehow we all made it work.”
Mrs. Hamling, 81, a longtime dance and piano teacher who once taught more than 60 children a week from her North Aurora home, died Sunday, June 3, in Provena Mercy Medical Center in Aurora, after a massive stroke.
She collapsed while planting flowers at the grave of her husband, Richard, who died in 2000, said family members. They had been married for 49 years.
“It was a poignant but fitting end to her life,” said her daughter. “She was the outgoing one, he was more reserved, but together they made a wonderful pair.”
Born in Chicago, Mrs. Hamling spent most of her childhood in Wheaton, before moving to Kansas with her family when she was 15. Two years later, she enrolled in a music school in Chicago, where family members said she earned her tuition by singing in a program at the Pump Room of the Drake Hotel that was broadcast on WLS-AM radio.
During that time, Mrs. Hamling married, and the couple moved to North Aurora in 1956, where they raised four children. A daughter, Kathleen Theresa, died in 1973.
People who grew up in North Aurora in the 1960s or 1970s probably took some kind of lessons — tap dancing, acrobatics, ballet or piano — from Mrs. Hamling, family members said.
“Nell had real talent and was an amazing teacher,” said Dorothy Blevins of North Aurora, whose daughter was a former student of Mrs. Hamling’s and is now a professional folk singer. “She truly loved teaching and I think the kids picked up on that.”
In more recent years, Mrs. Hamling performed during the holidays at Carson Pirie Scott & Co. in Aurora, playing Christmas carols on the piano, family members said.
“She was always the teacher,” her daughter said. “Kids would walk up and ask her to play something like ‘Jingle Bells’ and she’d say, ‘I’ll play that song only if you sing along,'”
Mrs. Hamling is also survived by a son, Gary; another daughter, Leah Jurgensen; a brother, Kerry Bahl; and six grandchildren.
Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Thursday in Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, 801 W. Oak St., North Aurora.
