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September 23, 1996 Lawrence Welk: Fact And Legend The Lawrence Welk story -- almost 10 years of it -- has an intimate Yankton connection, but sorting out the facts from the embellished legend created by publicists, reporters and even Welk himself can sometimes be a difficult task. It all began on March 11, 1903, when the sixth child of Ludwig and Christina Welk was born in a wood-sided sod house on a farm near Strasburg, N. D. The parents were Germans from Russia who had settled on their claim in Emmons County in 1893, arriving there in an ox-drawn cart after a long overland trek from the rail line at Eureka. Born in a German-speaking family, Lawrence attended a parochial school taught by Ursuline nuns who also spoke the same language. At age 10 he suddenly became ill, was driven into Strasburg by horse and buckboard wagon, then taken in the town's only car to Bismarck where he was operated on for a ruptured appendix at St. Alexis Hospital. He never returned to school after a lengthy recovery from the surgery and peritonitis, and he spent his teen-age years working on the family farm -- and nurturing a dream. Ludwig Welk's prize possession was a push-button accordion which he played at barn dances and other social functions in the area. The instrument fascinated his son who also learned to play on a $15 accordion he bought with money he earned trapping weasels, skunks and muskrats. As the story goes, at age 17 he appealed to his father to buy him a $400 accordion with a piano keyboard, promising Ludwig that he would remain on the farm until he was 21 and turning over any money he made to the family during that period. He got the instrument, and he fulfilled his part of the bargain. On his birthday in 1924 -- with enough cash for train fare and three one-dollar bills pinned to the inside of his new suit jacket -- he embarked with his accordion on what turned out to be a rocky road to stardom. During the next three years, he played at wedding dances, with a children's band called the Jazzy Junior Five in Aberdeen and with drummer Frank Schalk wherever they could find a booking. For a brief time he traveled with Lincoln Bould's Chicago Band, often unpaid. After that he performed with George T. Kelly's Peerless Entertainers, a small vaudeville-type troupe for which Lawrence played his accordion, posted handbills, sold candy between acts and acted as a Spanish corpse in a comedy murder sketch. (His German accent was too thick for a speaking part.) When the Peerless Entertainers folded, Lawrence teamed with drummer Johnny Higgins, saxophonist Howard Kieser and pianist Art Beal to play dance dates in and around Bismarck. But in the late fall of 1927 when an early blizzard struck, the four men decided they could work just as well where it was warmer, and they headed southward through blowing snow in an old touring car. Their destination was New Orleans -- but they never made it! At 4:30 in the morning (exact date uncertain), they pulled up at the Collins Hotel at Third and Douglas in Yankton, too cold and too tired to continue. He couldn't know it at the time, but that was the genesis of the Lawrence Welk decade-long odyssey in the Mother City -- and that also was when the conflicting accounts of his early career began to develop. For instance, Richard (Hinky Dink) Wildermuth, a Tripp restaurant operator, claimed to have directed Welk to the fledgling Radio Station WNAX. In his autobiography -- Wunnerful, Wunnerful! written with publicist Bernice McGeehan -- Lawrence says he thought of the idea of going to the station when he strolled the streets of Yankton waiting for his companions to wake up at the Collins. (Later, in an anniversary album, it was reported that he and his band played for the "opening-day broadcast" of WNAX. Not true.) No matter how it came about, he did seek out Chan Gurney, the station manager, who agreed to give the traveling band an audition. According to Welk, the audition turned out to be a live broadcast less than an hour later. Gurney himself said he fed the tired and dusty young musicians in the nursery company's cafeteria before putting them on the air; but whichever story is right, the quickly-named Lawrence Welk Novelty Orchestra was an immediate hit. Chan then offered them a one-week contract which Welk accepted, although New Orleans was still the quartet's ultimate destination. That one-week contract turned into a commitment to stay on, and Yankton began its continuing relationship with the North Dakota accordionist. Radio became an important factor in his early success as regular broadcasts over WNAX -- with interspersed commercials for Master Liquid Hog Tonic and other Gurney products -- helped him book dance engagements for his band throughout the listening area. His band became the Hotsy Totsy Boys and then the Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra, the latter being almost a book-length story in itself. The gum proved to be a highly successful -- but brief -- promotional gimmick, and contests to crown a Miss Honolulu Fruit Gum in various towns (a vote for every wrapper) resulted in soaring gum sales and large crowds wherever the band played. That, of course, was before the Wrigley company threatened legal action and ballroom managers complained because dancers left their floors covered with wrappers and wads of gum. Before that, though, a much more significant incident occurred in Yankton. A group of student nurses from Sacred Heart Hospital attended a Welk broadcast in the WNAX studio, and one of the young ladies -- Fern Renner, listed in the nursing school directory as Veronica -- caught the eye of the 26-year-old maestro. In his attempts to see her, Lawrence even submitted to a tonsil repair operation at the hospital, thinking that she might be assigned to his case. She wasn't. (Another version has it that he met her when he was confined at Sacred Heart after a gall bladder attack. Also not true, although Fern visited him in his room during an extended recovery period from the tonsil operation.) When she took a nursing job at St. Paul's Hospital in Dallas, Texas, after she had completed her training in 1929, the courtship continued by mail, culminating in an invitation from Lawrence for her to visit him in Denver where his band was playing at the Broadmoor Club. That's when he convinced her to marry him, and the wedding took place in Sacred Heart Cathedral in Sioux City, Iowa, on April 16, 1931. They and their attendants -- Dr. and Mrs. Frank Abts of Yankton -- were the only people in the church with Fr. Leo McCoy, then nervously conducting his first wedding ceremony. After that -- off and on for almost half a dozen years -- the Welk band headquartered in Yankton, broadcasting over WNAX and playing one-nighters throughout the region. To improve traveling and sleeping conditions for his musicians, he acquired a specially designed sleeper bus and hired Morris Knutsen as a full-time driver. By then the names of Leo Fortin, Terry George and Jerry Burke were prominent among his list of band members. The band vehicle -- which Welk himself said resembled a cattle carrier -- was a regular fixture at the Deep Rock gas station at Fifth and Broadway when it wasn't on the road. When he decided to seek broader horizons, the Welk saga switched from Yankton to Omaha not quite 10 years after Lawrence and his fatigued buddies first checked in at the Collins Hotel. His ensuing life with Fern and their three children, their unsuccessful ventures as hotel operators and chicken raisers, the creation of Champagne Music and his eventual rise to television fame are inspiring chapters in a truly American rags-to-riches story. Yanktonians who knew Lawrence and Fern during their sojourn in the Mother City can fill in their own blanks in this unique segment of the town's history. Lawrence Welk, Yankton's adopted celebrity, died on May 17, 1992, at the age of 89. [ Home Page ] |
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