Lawrence Welk is North Dakota's favorite son, a local boy who made it big. He was born on the outskirts of Strasburg in a sod house and -- though North Dakotans may deny it -- hated the place. He hated farming, hated his parents, and for all we know hated North Dakota. The sixth of nine children, he essentially sold himself into paternal slavery to pay back $400 he borrowed to buy his first accordion. He left home for good on his 21st birthday and never looked back, playing weddings and radio barn dances until, in 1955, he finally debuted on national TV. His parents weren't around to appreciate it; they had been dead for 15 years.
Official portrait of the first inductee in the North Dakota Hall of Fame in Bismarck.
Lawrence's birthplace, officially known as the Ludwig & Christina Welk Farmstead, is nestled among wheat fields north of town, out in the middle of nowhere (as are most North Dakota attractions) but fairly easy to find. A boom box sits in a window of the farmstead barn, pumping out happy accordion music. All you have to do is turn off Highway 83 and follow your ears.
An Ungrateful Son
The farmstead is very soothing, much like Lawrence Welk's music. A small main house, freshly painted and neat-as-a-pin, stands among a few cottonwood trees flanked by a summer kitchen, a barn, a granary, a windmill, a blacksmith shop, and the Lawrence Welk celebrity outhouse. In the barn, up in the hayloft door, stands a dummy wearing a Beatles' moptop wig and holding an accordion. This is supposed to represent young Lawrence. A bandstand, "dedicated to him" in 1989, stands off to one side. Lawrence didn't attend the dedication. His childhood rival played there instead.
In fact, Lawrence never visited at the bandstand and never saw the years of effort that his neighbors and friends put into restoring his birthplace. He often donated money to Strasburg, but specifically requested that none of it go to the farmstead restoration. He was invited many times to view the work in progress, but refused every offer. He died in 1992 in sunny, southern California, the year the restoration was completed. It is not recorded that he cared.
But you'll never suspect that when you visit. A happy, jolly Lawrence spirit fills the farmstead, as if he just stepped away to milk the cows or lay down a few bars of "The Beer Barrel Polka" and would be right back. In the main house, a life-size cardboard cutout of Mr. Wunnerful -- clad in a very angelic white tux, baton in mid-twirl -- stands in the far corner of the family dining room, beaming approval at entering visitors. Champagne orchestra music from LW's glory days fills every room from unseen speakers. Ludwig's accordion -- the one that inspired his son to get the hell out of North Dakota -- sits in a chair.
The Welk Farmstead and outhouse is run by Edna Schwab, LW's niece, one of eight volunteers who work in shifts at the place. Edna is very serious and dedicated. She's still pissed at Nancy Kassebaum for shooting down the farmstead's $500,000 Congressional appropriation restoration request (in fact, she only refers to Kassebaum as "the other Senator from Kansas"). But her anger turns to joy when she shows you three US maps covered with hundreds of colored pushpins. The pins mark the home towns of every visitor to the Lawrence Welk Birthplace for the past three years (averaging over 7,000 annually), and show that the heaviest concentration of Lawrence Welk groupies comes from -- surprise -- North Dakota, then sweeps south and east in a belt across southwestern Minnesota and Iowa. Big fan clusters can also be seen near San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It's hard to believe that several thousand people come here every year. The place is deserted. We made the mistake of mentioning that to Edna, and added that some of the buildings must get dusty, unused as they are, over the course of a summer. "You don't think they're clean?" she cried, her face horrorstruck. "We always try to keep the place clean." "No, no," we quickly replied. "It's clean. It's very clean." We had forgotten the North Dakotan obsession with tidiness.
It's tempting to speculate that the emptiness at the Welk Farmstead means something: a passing of the torch to a new generation of livelier musicians, a sign that old mega-celebrities do indeed fade away. But no. It has always been empty here.
