A longtime dance teacher in Suffolk retired this summer after 69 years of teaching local youth.

Myrtle Ann Mountcastle started teaching when she was still a youth herself. At 12 years old, she and her cousin taught in her aunt’s beauty shop in Franklin on Saturdays, lining their students up between the salon sinks and hair dryers.

“We taught dance right down the center of that beauty shop,” Mountcastle recalled recently.

The cousin kept at it for about 25 years, but Mountcastle surpassed even that. She went on to have a career in teaching dance that spanned nearly seven decades.

It was quite a remarkable accomplishment for a woman whose mother was told she might never walk.

Mountcastle was born in Wilmington, N.C., with a mild case of club feet, and the doctors told her mother that she would have to wear braces when she walked, if she walked at all.

Her mother decided her daughter would walk without braces, so she massaged her legs and feet every night. The doctor was impressed and told her mother to put her 3-year-old daughter in dance.

“I just absolutely fell in love with it,” Mountcastle said.

For a while, Mountcastle was “like a traveling roadshow,” she said, visiting different far-flung towns such as Surry, Wakefield, Sunbury, Ahoskie and Edenton to bring dance classes to the children who lived there.

In 1978, she purchased a building on Bosley Avenue and turned it into her studio.

She did and taught many styles of dance, including ballet, tap and jazz. In her 69-year career, she taught many students from before the first loose tooth until after the first boyfriend. She taught former students’ children and even a few grandchildren.

“I just watched them all through the years, the transformation,” she said. “The whole thing was just working with the kids.”

She has six former students teaching dance throughout the country.

The decision to retire was hard, she said, because she still loves it.

“I’m going to miss it,” she said. “How many people are able to have a job or profession that they can go 69 years … and really weren’t ready to walk away? I feel very fortunate.”

Mountcastle said she has no big plans for retirement, but she hopes to be able to spend more time with her brother, nephew and great-niece.