Lois Beth (Bellet) Erwin

Lois Beth (Bellet) Erwin died peacefully at her home in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, on Sunday, October 19, 2025, at the age of 95.

Lois was born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1930. She began ballet lessons at age five and, by thirteen, was accepted into the School of American Ballet. She commuted daily by train into New York to study with George Balanchine, Alexandra Danilova, Anatole Oboukhoff and other Russian émigrés who taught an entire generation of American ballet dancers. By her twentieth birthday, Lois’s career was well underway as a member of the Corps de Ballet at Radio City Music Hall, where, for the next three years, she performed four shows a day, seven days a week—with “a few days off once in a while.”

In 1954, just four days before her final show, Lois attended a downtown party for dancers and musicians where she fell into conversation with a lanky, wry trombone player and raconteur from Texas who was freelancing on Broadway. Six weeks later, Lois Bellet and Edward Erwin were married, and the next stage of her life began. 

Over the following years, Lois raised three children and turned to local politics, serving for nine years on the Board of Education in Waldwick, New Jersey. Later in life, she became a passionate student of American history and an inexhaustible supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his special assistant, Harry Hopkins. She founded an American history club and a Bill of Rights club—two of many lifelong passions she pursued tirelessly—and led each for fifteen years.

Lois was predeceased by her husband, Edward. She is survived by her three children—Steve Erwin (Alison Valtin), Karen Erwin, and Mitch Erwin—her granddaughter, Leah Valtin-Erwin (Forrest Jackson), and her grandson, Tommy Valtin-Erwin (Shaina Valtin-Erwin), along with many nieces and nephews, all of whom admired and loved her for her deep and occasionally fearsome intellect, as well as her profound love for her family.

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