Fixing to Dance

Some people say. the president and CEO of Home-Tech has a good hustle. 

It turns out he’s got a good cha-cha, too, and a prize-winning samba. 

Steve Marino, president of the company for 28 years, loves to take a turn on the dance floor and works with a ballroom dance instructor to stay on his toes. 

“We have a studio here at the regional Home-Tech office,” says Marino. “In half the training room we installed mirrors, so on the night that [my partner and I] train, we just move the tables aside and use it as a dance studio.” 

A pilot and former martial arts practitioner, Marino, 56, started ballroom dancing in 1991, and quickly found how challenging it is. “It involves mechanics that most men really have never done. How to be graceful doing routines and learning to dance with another person is difficult,” he says. “In ballroom dancing, the man is the frame and the woman is the picture, so the man has to be very poised. He always has to know what steps he’s going to do a split second before he does it; he leads the dance.” 

In spite of a few years off the dance floor, he carried home the prize in 2007 from the StarStruck competition, a local fundraiser for the American Red Cross. “My daughter volunteered me to be one of the stars, so I got back into training with a professional ballroom dancer, and we ended up winning the event,” he says. 

The following year, StarStruck is where he met the woman who would become his new dance partner—and fiancée. Now, he and Tamara Surratt whirl across the dance floor whenever they get a chance—and in their weekly classes at Home-Tech. 

“I like to keep it as a fun activity rather than to make it stressful with competition, at least at this moment,” Marino says. And recently, their concentration has been on the waltz they’ll dance at their October wedding.