Welcome

Dear Friends,

My name is Gwendolyn Paro, and I am eighty-five years old. I live in Mesa, Arizona, with my daughter Loretta and her husband, and my grandson Benjamin, who is nineteen and studying engineering, set up this page for me on the family computer. He said, Grandma, you should put down what you remember, because nobody else remembers it. So I am putting it down. He typed the codes and I typed the words, one finger at a time, and I hope you will forgive me if it took me most of the summer.

This page is about Lawrence Welk and his music, which I have loved for sixty-three years. I danced to his band once, when I was a young woman, and I have watched his program nearly every Saturday night since we bought our first television set. I still watch him every Saturday. You may think that is a strange thing for a person to put on the computer, but Benjamin tells me there are pages on here about everything, so there may as well be one about this.

The night I danced to his band

I grew up on my father's farm in the south central part of North Dakota, not so very far from Strasburg, where Mr. Welk was born. Our people were Germans from Russia, the same as his. Our grandparents had come over from the German villages near the Black Sea, and we spoke German at home. I did not speak a word of English until I started school, and Mr. Welk, as everyone knows, spoke English with an accent his whole life. When I heard him talk on the television, I heard my uncles. I think a great many of us felt that way. He was one of ours.

In the summer of 1936 I was twenty-two years old. That was the year of the terrible heat, when it was over a hundred degrees for days on end and the grasshoppers ate what the dry weather did not take. Nobody had any money. But when we heard that the Welk band was coming to play at a pavilion by a lake over the line in South Dakota, my cousin Rose and I saved our egg money for weeks, and her brother drove us down in my uncle's truck.

I remember the lights strung along the roof, and how the floor was polished so smooth you could slide on it in your stocking feet, though of course we did not. I remember that the band played waltzes and polkas and schottisches, the same dances we did at weddings at home, only played so much more sweetly. And I remember Mr. Welk himself, a young man with his accordion, smiling at the dancers the whole night as if every one of us was his own guest. He was thirty-three then. It was before the name Champagne Music, which came a little later, but the music was already light and bright, nothing heavy about it.

A young man named Ralph Paro asked me for the second waltz. He was a terrible dancer and he knew it, and he asked me anyway. We were married two years later, in 1938, and we farmed together for forty-four years before we retired into town, and we danced at every wedding in the county. Ralph passed away in 1990. I like to think that I owe Mr. Welk a little bit of my married life, because if his band had not come to that pavilion, Ralph and I might never have met.

Mr. Welk's life, in brief

For those who do not know the story, or who are young, here it is as briefly as I can tell it.

His one big record on the popular charts was Calcutta, in 1961, which was a bright little tune on the harpsichord that Ralph whistled in the barn for a whole year. His theme song was Bubbles in the Wine. You may know that one even if you do not think you do.

Saturday evenings

Ralph and I bought our first television set in 1957, and from then on, Saturday night was Welk night. We did the chores early. I made coffee and kuchen, and the neighbors who did not have a set yet came over, and we sat in the front room and watched the bubbles float up across the screen at the start of the program, and nobody said a word until the first number was over.

Now, all these years later, the public television station shows the old programs again on Saturday evenings, and I do not miss one if I can help it. Loretta watches with me, and sometimes Benjamin does, when he is not going out. He laughs at the costumes, and I let him, because he also taps his foot, and I see him doing it.

If you have never watched the program, here is what you will see. First the bubbles, rising and drifting, while the band plays the theme. Then Mr. Welk at the front with his baton, very polite, introducing everybody as if they were his own family, which in a way they were. Then the music: a big band number, a polka with the accordion going like a sewing machine, a sweet song from the Champagne Lady, a tap dancer, a hymn, a novelty number with everyone in funny hats. The band does not play loudly. Everything is clean and bright and in its place. And at some point, if you are lucky, Mr. Welk steps down into the audience and dances a few turns with one of the ladies there, and you can see her face, and that is the best part of the whole evening.

People make fun of it. I know that. They say it is corny and old fashioned. But I have lived through a great deal, the Depression and the war and burying my husband, and I will tell you that an hour every week of music that is kind to you is not such a small thing.

On the next page I have written a little about my favorites in the Musical Family, as Mr. Welk called them, then and now.

Other pages I like

Benjamin found these for me. Ballroom at Sixty is by a very nice couple, Marion and Frank, who took up ballroom dancing when they were sixty, and they explain the waltz better than I ever could. I read the part about counting out loud to Loretta and we both laughed. And The Wiley Burkhalter Orchestra is a son's page about his father's dance band in Green County, Wisconsin, forty-three years of Saturday night polkas and waltzes. He played the drums in it. Those were the bands we danced to, when we could not get to see Mr. Welk.

Thank you for visiting with me. If you danced to Mr. Welk's band, or watched the program with your own family, I would be very glad to hear from you. Benjamin reads me my letters and helps me answer them.

Sincerely yours,
Gwendolyn Paro