She watched her last Lawrence Welk show in June of 1980. I saw my family and grandma's life in the book, accordions and all. During her 81st August, while she was failing, I read to her from "Wunnerful, Wunnerful," Welk's simple autobiography. When the show went successfully from network to syndicate in 1971, she was thrilled to receive it twice weekly over competing stations. The thought of dancing with Lawrence Welk was the only time my grandmother ever hinted that a male-female relationship might be fun. They did, too.įor people like my aging, hardworking immigrant grandmother, the Lawrence Welk show was the Met, Carnegie Hall, all things fun, beautiful and unattainable. All the Lennon sisters planned to be good girls, get married and have lots of babies.
Lawrence welk goodnight movie#
My grandmother, a fanatic Welk fan, pointed out the stories of the good lives of the Welk musical family in assorted movie magazines. They were the personification of chastity, which probably explains why they had no pimples. In all the years since, no one has had hair like Dianne Lennon's. They had petite figures and wonderful hair. They had perfect faces with turned-up noses and straight teeth. We were dressed in the mode of the Lennon sisters. My mother takes comfort in my sister's being a church organist. We are 33 and 29 now, the show is over, and we never made it. My mother - swear to God - told her friends she hoped one of her daughters would be Welk's featured organist one day. To make sure we were isolated from that, he purchased a Hammond electric organ. My father, until the day he died, blamed teenagers for the decline and fall of Western civilization. Sometimes my parents would whirl across the living room carpet, dancing to Welk's "nice music," as my father called it - a direct slam aimed at the music of American Bandstand, which had crept onto the Saturday airwaves and become important to my sister and me. My father fell in love first with champagne lady Alice Lon, and later with much-too-young Peggy Lennon. He was Elvis to the cow-milking set.įor years my parents debated the Lawrence Welk toupee question. Virtually every person I knew watched Lawrence Welk every Saturday night. Not exciting or stirring or rousing, just pleasant. But he was all-American, all-Christian, and all things right with the world. This Dakota farmboy, like many people we knew, had lived here all his life and still switched v's and w's. Lawrence Welk was well known to country people in the Midwest, especially German country people like himself. The major concern in the world we knew was the growing popularity of the electric razor. It was sometime after and long before a war. And weren't some of the other band members handsome? No tractor grease imbedded in their unlined hands.
"That can't be his own hair, Hon," father said to mother, as she grinned at Welk, who grinned back, right in our own living room. As the signal from ABC's Channel 7 limped across the cornfields from Chicago, my mind recorded one of those strange childhood memories that goes deep into the bank but stays forever clear. But Lawrence Welk was a country celebrity. I remember the event vividly because television was new to us around Eola, Ill.
I was 6 years old when I watched the first Lawrence Welk show broadcast nationwide in June of 1955. I'm going to watch it here in my city apartment, feeling something is going wrong. THE LAST ORIGINAL Lawrence Welk Show airs tonight.
Is a correspondent for Life magazine in Wa April 18, 1982
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