In the dimly lighted theater lobby-cum-museum, a plaque proclaims, "A total of 10,300,000,000 people! (You read that right! That's 10.3 billion!). Plus, the maestro was enormously popular in his time - and maintains a certain stature even now, 23 years after his death. Oh, and that annoying accordion music.īut the more I perused the memorabilia and read his up-by-the-bootstraps story - son of German immigrants, grew up in a sod house on the North Dakota prairie - the more affection I felt for the show. The old guy with the baton saying, in his funny accent, "Wunnerful, wunnerful" when introducing a squeaky-clean group like the Lennon Sisters, then prepping the band with the catchphrase, "Ah-1 and ah-2." The way Grandma swooned over the dapper, white-tuxedoed band leader with fervor equal to her allegiance to the L.A. When I stepped through the glass doors, memories flowed like the bubbly: Grandma. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this resort, featuring two golf courses, retail shopping and dining, time shares, a fishing pond, and hiking trails, also is home to the Lawrence Welk Museum, inside the recently expanded Welk Theater. There, on the northern reaches of Escondido, a freeway sign alerted me to the Champagne Boulevard exit and something called the Welk Resort San Diego. I never cottoned to Welk - not my generation, sorry - and I hadn't thought about him in decades until I found myself recently driving from San Diego to Southern California's Inland Empire region on the world's widest freeway, Interstate 15. Rather, I'm going to bore you tearless by reminiscing about Lawrence Welk.
I'm not going to wax nostalgic about what a legendary "sports" franchise the Los Angeles Thunderbirds became how announcer Dick Lane taught me the virtues of hyperbole how Grandma would shake her fist at the screen when a dirty skater from the cursed Bay City Bombers sent her beloved Danny "Carrot Top" Reilly careering over the rail. The shows: roller derby and The Lawrence Welk Show. Those Saturday night viewing parties might go far in explaining my enduring affection for kitsch. No, these two mid-1960s programs were so radically different in tone and content that, in retrospect, I guess you could call Grandma a Renaissance woman, embracing culture both high and low. Not her stories - those soap operas were too risque for a tyke.
Grandma let me watch only two TV shows in her upstairs lair.