![lawrence welk cast retirement lawrence welk cast retirement](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/81/3f/0a/813f0ae315b70a4adcd3b9bb603fd09b--the-lawrence-welk-show-mickey-mouse-club.jpg)
He grew up on the outskirts of Strasburg, North Dakota, where hardly anything ever happened except that the land tore your guts out. 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).Īnd 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. 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. 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.”Īll signs are that Welk shared O’Hara’s opinion about the younger generation. “The Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie people have been on too long. “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. 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.īy 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. In the late 1960s it must have been difficult for my parents, with their particular musical tastes, to survive in our household. (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.) 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. 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.)Īmazingly 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). 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.
![lawrence welk cast retirement lawrence welk cast retirement](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vs2pOSMxH5Y/U8G071R6aHI/AAAAAAAACzA/zT0kQKtGxOE/s1600/W-TheBlenders.jpg)
![lawrence welk cast retirement lawrence welk cast retirement](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Mancinimercer003.jpg)
(God knows there wasn’t much else in the CBS show that resembled our lives. 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.
#Lawrence welk cast retirement tv
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. Wunnerful, wunnerful, as the maestro used to say each week, beneath that ever-present Geritol sign hanging over his Champagne Music Makers. 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. 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.