July 2, 1955—It began as a summer replacement show that, even in the Eisenhower era, was derided by critics not just as sunny or nostalgic as hopelessly square, white-bread, even retrograde. But The Lawrence Welk Show – my parents’ favorite night of music on TV each week —lasted 16 years on ABC and yet another 11 in syndication. Wunnerful, wunnerful, as the maestro used to say each week, beneath that ever-present Geritol sign hanging over his Champagne Music Makers. (Talk about product placement!)
In the late Sixties, Welk battled in the ratings in his Saturday night time slot against My Three Sons—and every week, my two brothers and I plotted how we would gain control of the TV to watch what, in our opinion, was the far cooler Fred MacMurray sitcom. The latter seemed like the type of show that John, Tommy and I could identify with –three boys and no girls to get in the way.
(God knows there wasn’t much else in the CBS show that resembled our lives. Take Fred MacMurray’s character, widower Steve Douglas, a lanky, WASPy aeronautical engineer who turned hopelessly clueless any time he gave more than a second’s thought to the latest dilemma besetting Robbie, Chip or Ernie. In what possible way was he like our father, a 5-ft.-7-inch Irishman who didn’t have time to puzzle out raising kids when he was working all kinda crazy hours in his blue-collar jobs to make sure they were fed and could attend parochial school? And the boys’ Uncle Charlie was nothing like our mom, who dispensed smiles as freely as pieces of cake whenever we got home.)
Amazingly enough, Welk and his cast of singers, dancers and musicians are still on TV, more than 50 years after they premiered—only this time they appear, in their original color (or, in the first days of the show, black and white) incarnations on PBS stations (usually 6-7 PM on Saturday evenings in the New York area station, WLIW).
In the late Sixties, Welk battled in the ratings in his Saturday night time slot against My Three Sons—and every week, my two brothers and I plotted how we would gain control of the TV to watch what, in our opinion, was the far cooler Fred MacMurray sitcom. The latter seemed like the type of show that John, Tommy and I could identify with –three boys and no girls to get in the way.
(God knows there wasn’t much else in the CBS show that resembled our lives. Take Fred MacMurray’s character, widower Steve Douglas, a lanky, WASPy aeronautical engineer who turned hopelessly clueless any time he gave more than a second’s thought to the latest dilemma besetting Robbie, Chip or Ernie. In what possible way was he like our father, a 5-ft.-7-inch Irishman who didn’t have time to puzzle out raising kids when he was working all kinda crazy hours in his blue-collar jobs to make sure they were fed and could attend parochial school? And the boys’ Uncle Charlie was nothing like our mom, who dispensed smiles as freely as pieces of cake whenever we got home.)
Amazingly enough, Welk and his cast of singers, dancers and musicians are still on TV, more than 50 years after they premiered—only this time they appear, in their original color (or, in the first days of the show, black and white) incarnations on PBS stations (usually 6-7 PM on Saturday evenings in the New York area station, WLIW).
My parents regard Welk and his regulars—the Lennon Sisters, “Champagne Lady” Norma Zimmer, Irish tenor Joe Feeney, frogvoiced bass vocalist Larry Hooper, dancer Art Duncan (the lone African-American in the cast!), dancer Bobby Burgess, the blond ragtime pianist JoAnn Castle, and the genial accordionist and assistant conductor, the late Myron Floren—as practically members of the family. (These days, when the performers come on the show to reminisce about the old days, they might mention, in addition to their grandchildren, their divorces—a no-no to Welk and his audience five decades ago, but hardly a social earthquake these days, of course.)
In the late 1960s it must have been difficult for my parents, with their particular musical tastes, to survive in our household. There was me, still being weaned from bubblegum music by my brothers, and John and Tommy, who had begun to get into The Who, The Woodstock soundtrack album, and all kinds of even harsher rock music that, to older ears, must have sounded barbarian yelps resounding at the gates.
By the 1960s, one of my favorite fiction writers, John O’Hara, used Lawrence Welk viewers as convenient shorthand for the kind of grouchy conservative he had become. “I think it's time the Lawrence Welk people had their say," wrote O'Hara in a (deservedly) short-lived Newsday column from that period. “The Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie people have been on too long. When the country is in trouble, like war kind of trouble, man, it is the Lawrence Welk people who can be depended upon, all the way.”
All signs are that Welk shared O’Hara’s opinion about the younger generation. In one of the more bizarre episodes late in the series’ network run, he parodied the counterculture movement by donning an ill-fitting hippie wig. I rank it as one of the most bizarre moments in pop-culture history, right up there with Richard Nixon naming Elvis Presley as a personal top-secret drug enforcement agent (and if you don’t believe me, check out the picture accompanying this post).
And yet, in his own way, Welk experienced as much—perhaps even more—of a generation gap between himself and his parents than hippies did with theirs in the Sixties. He grew up on the outskirts of Strasburg, North Dakota, where hardly anything ever happened except that the land tore your guts out. (Check out Jonathan Raban’s searing nonfiction chronicle, Bad Land (1996), and see what I mean.) It was terribly isolated, with Welk, the child of German immigrants, seeing so few people outside his family or even community that he didn’t learn English till he was 21.
As the sixth of nine kids, it would have been easy for him to become lost in that family—except that, in that inhospitable rural environment, every kid was needed to squeeze everything possible out of the land. If Welk hated farming—and he did, with a passion—there was one thing he might have disliked more: his parents, for making him pay back every penny of the $400 he borrowed from them to buy the instrument that had come to thrill his heart: an accordion of his own, just like his father’s. Significantly, he never went back to his hometown or farmstead, even when fans and local townspeople began to create in his honor a museum from his old home.
No, Welk’s kind of place was Southern California, where he lived, retired, and made tons of money from real estate investment and development—including a family resort where a relative of mine vacationed about 15 years ago. “
In the late 1960s it must have been difficult for my parents, with their particular musical tastes, to survive in our household. There was me, still being weaned from bubblegum music by my brothers, and John and Tommy, who had begun to get into The Who, The Woodstock soundtrack album, and all kinds of even harsher rock music that, to older ears, must have sounded barbarian yelps resounding at the gates.
By the 1960s, one of my favorite fiction writers, John O’Hara, used Lawrence Welk viewers as convenient shorthand for the kind of grouchy conservative he had become. “I think it's time the Lawrence Welk people had their say," wrote O'Hara in a (deservedly) short-lived Newsday column from that period. “The Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie people have been on too long. When the country is in trouble, like war kind of trouble, man, it is the Lawrence Welk people who can be depended upon, all the way.”
All signs are that Welk shared O’Hara’s opinion about the younger generation. In one of the more bizarre episodes late in the series’ network run, he parodied the counterculture movement by donning an ill-fitting hippie wig. I rank it as one of the most bizarre moments in pop-culture history, right up there with Richard Nixon naming Elvis Presley as a personal top-secret drug enforcement agent (and if you don’t believe me, check out the picture accompanying this post).
And yet, in his own way, Welk experienced as much—perhaps even more—of a generation gap between himself and his parents than hippies did with theirs in the Sixties. He grew up on the outskirts of Strasburg, North Dakota, where hardly anything ever happened except that the land tore your guts out. (Check out Jonathan Raban’s searing nonfiction chronicle, Bad Land (1996), and see what I mean.) It was terribly isolated, with Welk, the child of German immigrants, seeing so few people outside his family or even community that he didn’t learn English till he was 21.
As the sixth of nine kids, it would have been easy for him to become lost in that family—except that, in that inhospitable rural environment, every kid was needed to squeeze everything possible out of the land. If Welk hated farming—and he did, with a passion—there was one thing he might have disliked more: his parents, for making him pay back every penny of the $400 he borrowed from them to buy the instrument that had come to thrill his heart: an accordion of his own, just like his father’s. Significantly, he never went back to his hometown or farmstead, even when fans and local townspeople began to create in his honor a museum from his old home.
No, Welk’s kind of place was Southern California, where he lived, retired, and made tons of money from real estate investment and development—including a family resort where a relative of mine vacationed about 15 years ago. “
"Did you play shuffleboard?” my relative was asked—not the first time, and probably not the last, that this most unfashionable practitioner of what an acquaintance of mine once called “Grandma’s Music” has been ridiculed and dismissed. I’m sure that, 16 years after his death, in whatever afterlife exists, Welk is laughing off those comments as much now as he did when he first came on the air, popping bubbles and smiling as his theme song concluded.
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