Lawrence Welk

"April 27, 2002:  Rained last night and this morning.  No kids here so I watched Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo shows.
April 28, 2002:  Talked to Greta in morning.  Nancy came in p.m. and brought our dinner from Boston Market.  I showered and then we played Rummikub.
April 29, 2002:  Played lazy all day.  Cards tonight in Party Room.  Dolores came after the games and we played Scrabble."

The one person I immediately associate with Lawrence Welk is Grandma Anna.  I may be wrong, but as a kid I remembered she was a big, big fan.  She had her other favorite shows, Perry Mason stands out, but I am pretty sure Lawrence Welk was right up there.

Here is some information about him that I found interesting:

     Welk was born in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota. He was sixth of the eight children of Ludwig and Christiana (Schwahn) Welk, ethnic Germans who emigrated to America in 1892 from Selz, Kutschurgan District, in the German-speaking area north of Odessa (now Odessa, Ukraine, but then in southwestern Russia).

     The family lived on a homestead that today is a tourist attraction. They spent the cold North Dakota winter of their first year under an upturned wagon covered in sod. Welk decided on a career in music and persuaded his father to buy a mail-order accordion for $400 (equivalent to $4,584 as of 2013). He promised his father that he would work on the farm until he was 21, in repayment for the accordion. Any money he made elsewhere during that time, doing farmwork or performing, would go to his family.

     A common misconception is that Welk did not learn English until he was 21. In fact, he began learning English as soon as he started school. The part of North Dakota where he lived had been settled largely by Germans from Russia; even his teachers spoke English as a second language. Welk thus acquired his trademark accent, typical of these Plattdeutsch or Low-German-speaking immigrants who usually spoke the language at home long after they began to learn English at school. He took elocution lessons in the 1950s and could speak almost accent-free, but he realized his public expected to hear him say: "A-one, an-a-two" and "Wunnerful, Wunnerful!" When he was asked about his ancestry, he would always reply "Alsace-Lorraine, Germany," from where his forebears had emigrated to Russia (and which, at the time of Welk's birth in 1903, had become part of the German Empire).  [from Wikipedia]

Later in the same article it said he did fulfill the promise to his father.  And also, even though he was said to be tight with money, he paid his band top scale and that long tenure for his musicians was common.  He was with the times, too -- his license plate read A1ANA2.  In the photo, he is posing with Norma Zimmer.