'The TV started one night when a local television station came to us at the Aragon and said, 'Do you mind if we pick you up tonight,'' Welk recalled at one time.
In 1951 the orchestra was signed for a six-week engagement at the Aragon Ballroom at Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica, Calif. The station was the group's headquarters for the next six years as they did one-night stands through the Midwest and eventually long-term engagements in Chicago, New York, New Orleans, Boston and Pittsburgh.ĭuring the 1940s Welk and his band played regularly at the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago. He formed his first orchestra in Aberdeen, S.D., and played on radio station WNAX in Yankton, S.D. He promised to remain on the farm until he was 21 if his father would buy him a new $400 accordion, and to turn over to his father every penny he made until the debt was repaid.Īt 21, he launched his musical career, an accordion soloist who couldn't read music and never had a formal lesson. Welk was born on March 11, 1903, on a farm near Strasburg, N.D., one of eight children of immigrants who left the Alsace-Lorraine region of what is now northern France in 1878.īy the time he was 13, he was playing at community dances and church socials on an heirloom accordion his father brought from the old country. His audiences of middle-aged and older viewers took his performers to heart - especially a quartet of fresh-faced young women named the Lennon Sisters he introduced on his Christmas Eve, 1955, show. Welk's signature 'uh one, and uh two,' conducting style, his praise of his 'wunnerful' performers, and his grinning on-stage polkas with matrons from the audience as the 'bubblemachine' cranked away made him a household name.
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