,,,, I had to watch Lawrence Welk as a kid.

We’ll be back to watch Myron play with his organ after this word from Geritol!

"Ah one, ana two----."

And not that dancing kneegrow boy Arthur Duncan gonna cut da rug! !

LOL !

Dance boy dance!!!

Oh gawd - one of the most painful shows I ever had to watch when I was at the grandparent's house.

I always wondered what the hell Geritol was.

Parents like Lawrence Welk. Older sister liked Donny Osmond. It was a dearth of music I liked.

I read a while back that old tightwad only paid those full time musicians $110 a week. Guess they sucked it up for the exposure, for whatever that was worth on that gay ass show.

Come on. Lawrence Welk came on right before Hee Haw.

The Lennon Sisters made me hot :-)

I liked the bubbles. That meant the end was near.

My grandad always said he'd watch the Lawrence Welk Show until ^^^ "he" ^^^ came on, and then he'd go to bed...

Grandad meant it too! When that tap dancer came on, he'd cuss a bit, then get up, and go to bed!

I hated that show, Wild Kingdom, Walt Disney, then Lawrence Welk on Sunday. I think that was the correct order.

Now Norma Zimmer our champagne lady will sing I tore my cotton britches on da Mason/Dixon line!

Bonanza is in there somewhere!

Now Bobby and Annette will dance a lively waltz for us. "50s tv helped me develop a reading habit.


mike r

that and when billy graham would take over a whole evening with one of his programs. ooof aahh, time to go play outside

Me too. With one TV and two channels, later three channels, there was no choice.

If you can't tune a tv antenna with a piece tinfoil, you don't know jack!

Mine, an Italian immigrant, would "highlight" his weekly paper and followed so to the tee. A Readers Digest fan as well.

My dweeb stepdad was related to one of the guys on the Lawrence Welk show.
He was a Quaker. And my sis and I were reminders of our mom having banged a good lookin dude before his fat wimp azz came into the picture.
Non violent, conscientious objector, but beat on my ass all the time (til I fought back).

Never liked the mofugga.

He ded now. Good riddance. Mom seemed clueless (lazy). She built a new house about 7 yrs ago. I aint seen it yet.

I went to school, was an indentured servant, did all the yard work. Was basically a slave. I left and my 1/2 brother got a rider mower, power weed whacker and bush trimmer.

Amazing.

I don't like him either, condescending prick like his dad. Eh, I have more college than anybody else in my fam and am the poorest fugger.
But I don't kiss ass or suck deke or play golf.

I kill [bleep] and grill it. Suits me fine.

Being the smallest kid in a school of over 3K, and half of em bused in groids from down town, yeah, jr/sr high sucked. Of course I grew right after HS.
No reunions either. Fuggem.

Glad that [bleep] was over.

Back in those days, everyone thought I was the fugging remote control.

Not Lawrence Welk, but...

Bobby and Cissy, Mike! LOL! Bobby and Cissy!!!

You will never hear that from me though it was true.

Didn't everyone over the age of 50-55?

I did to...even have a couple cassette tapes ... I can hear it now.... out of Faribault Minnesota polka polka 10 10 that's my favorite song , good times imo !

Hee Haw was where the "talent" was.

yup ...good times ! Hehaw was in the weekend mix some where... I needed to be about 3 years older to really enjoy them chics...and go blind at the same times lol

I had to watch it with Grandma and Grandpa, but on the plus side Grandma was a huge "Big Time Wrestling" fan!!

I spent some deer seasons at a camp in the northern Adirondacks as young man. They kept a generator there for running power tools. They would run it for one hour on Saturday night to watch Hee Haw.

At least one of our three channels got heehaw and the girls short were short

I made the mistake of turning Grandma's TV to a different channel one time and planted my ass in front of it ..... she couldn't get out of the damn chair to beat my ass she would u if she could of ...I switched it back and she never really liked me again ...no chit...

I grew up in Atlanta. Grammy Lewis was from South Dakota. Every summer she would come down and spend a week. On Saturday night, it was Lawrence Welk on our only tv. If you didn't like that, you could hit the road!

Lawrence was a North Dakota boy, practically next door to Grammy Lewis' place.

On WPTZ, Channel 5, Plattsburgh?

Ditto.
Subjugated to that schit also.....
Late 60,s early 70,s version of being water boarded as a kid.

Bobo Brazil, Lord Layton, Haystacks Calhoun, The Stomper, Ernie Ladd, The Mighty Igor, Flying Fred Curry, The Sheikh.

I thought it was Bobby and Annette before they got the Mouse Ears. But I would never contend a point in history with you.


mike r

My mother bough the 8-Track of Zamfir and his Pan Flute.

You all think you had it rough. I had to wade through 16 feet of shag carpet to change the channel. Those sissies today with their remotes just don't have any concept of what we went through just to watch TV.

I feel blessed growing up so poor we had no TV 🤔

It wasn't good. But I did give my children a good upbringing and they know it and love me.

We didn't have TV until I was 13. We'd go over to my grandparents 2 or 3 days a week to watch TV when I was little. Sometimes mom would let us stay over on a Friday night so we could watch cartoons Saturday morning. My grandparents did like to watch Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw.

Soul Train Baby!!!

We were so poor we couldn't even pay attention!
My mom was a big Lawrence Welk fan. She even played his records on our Magnavox stereo console.
Sometimes things went a little haywire on the show.

Yep, and had to adjust the rabbit ears for 2 of the 3 channels. Catch hell if I screwed up the tinfoil wings.

Love the welk reruns.......like being stuck to an electric fence.........cant tear myself away.

I think it was a "wan an a two" right?

Paternal Grandma got Christmas cards from Lawrence Welk. Later when I had kids they began fighting over the TV regularly. I got tired of telling them to stop. Turned it off, unplugged it, and cut the cord off at the casing. It was that way for about three years during which they learned to play together, by themselves, or read, etc. It gave me more peace all the way around. Momma was happier too. Be Well, RZ.

Man that's a blast from the past.

Pretty much describes my day today.I'm dying from a little bit of yard work.

Lawrence Welk, Ed Sullivan, Perry Mason, and the Friday Night Fights.

That's what I watched staying at grandparent's house.

Welk was on Saturdays. Mostly.

Sounds like my GrandDad too !

I don't know what they were paid per show - but they were getting union scale or better and it was 1971 - so how many hours did they work for that $110 ?

Was the same at my grandparents house,they had an old G.E. black n white T.V.
That they bought new in the 50's that lasted until the early 70's then they got a wood consol Zenith color set,i still remember my grandfather would say every time they turned it on: My God Stella,look at the colors ! Did you ever think we d see such a thing? My God, will ya look at that,GUNSMOKE in color!
They liked to
Watch Disney,Wild Kingdom and Lawrence Welk,but my grandfather HATED Lawrence Welk with a passion,loved the show,hated him.All he did was yell at the T.V. ," I wish that mumbling bastard would shut the hell up!""why the hell does he have to talk all the time?" Fun times with Bryers ice cream in the living room.I m sitting in that very room right now.

That was the scale I referenced.

“Still others left the show over money disputes with Welk, who paid the minimum union scale to his cast. “We worked at group scale, which was $110 a week, for 10 years,” Kathy Lennon recalled. “After that he agreed to pay us solo scale, $210 a week. That’s what we finished out at. When we told him we’d stay if he’d pay us double scale, he told us, ‘No act is worth a penny over scale to me.”

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-lawrence-welk-19920519-20160516-snap-story.html

Me too. I would have preferred watching grass grow to watching Lawrence Welk. How did that show survive even half a season?

If it wasn't for Lawrence Welk, not of you old farts would know what a polka is.

And why would be a problem? I've never waltzed, polkaed, done the twist, or funky chicken.

Hated Lawrence Welk. But I don't mind that schitty accordian music when they play it in a Mezcan restaurant. For some reason, it is a lot harder to tolerate it on tv in English than it is when the singing is in gibberish at the restaurant.

Maybe tacos and Dos Equis make it better.

My parents watched Lawrence Welk.
Grandparents watched it.
Even my high school sweetheart's parents watched it.
There was no escape!

Only had 3 channels, 3, 11 and 32. Black and white in the early tears until we got a Curtis Mathis color unit. Lawrence Welk I didn't like, Porter Wagner I hated. Here is a rundown on the other shows of my youth.

Shows I liked
High Chaparral, Linda Crystal as Victoria is responsible for my lifelong admiration of brunette women
The Partridge Family, same for Susan Dey
Sonny and Cher
Hee Haw on Saturday nights. Got Misty Rowe's autograph at a car show later in life, she was hawt in person
Laugh-In
Gunsmoke, I liked Miss Kitty
Bugs Bunny/Road runner/Foghorn Leghorn cartoons
The Monkeys
Captain Kangaroo
Scooby Doo
Abbott and Costello on Sunday mornings

Shows I didn't like
Porter Wagner
Lawrence Welk
The Wide World of Sports
Star Trek
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
Wonderful World of Disney
Woody Woodpecker cartoons

The Monkees? WTF??

I didn't mind it.

The vertical hold didn't work well on our TV. You'd see the black band steadily grow and grow. Get the first roll...pause. Hoping it would stabilize.,,it never did. The rolling gets progressively faster.

And then dad would yell for one of us kids to adjust it and change the channel while we're at it.

My Nana used the smack the hell outta the side of the TV with a yardstick.

Yup! That's funny! If dad thought we were out of earshot, we could hear him get up, cuss, and smack the side of the TV.

We had terrible ghost images on the set too. Watching any sporting event wasn't for the inattentive.

She had cataracts so she was close enough anyway. LOL

Barnaby Jones start rolling....and WHAPP!!!

My childhood was about a good as it could have been!!!!!

Fellow Lawrence Welk Survivors:

Good morning to you all, I trust that despite a childhood filled with accordion polka music you're all as well as can be - again taking the musical influence into account.

Sometimes on the show, either the producers wouldn't tell Lawrence what the songs really meant or perhaps - perhaps - Lawrence was a closet hemp hedge smoker?

How else does one explain this Brewer and Shipley classic ending up on the show?



Stay well as can be all.

Dwayne

I'd pay a big bundle to spend this upcoming Saturday evening watching Lawrence Welk with my dad's parents and then as the sun went down walk the block and a half to my mom's folks and sit on my Grandpa's lap and watch Hee Haw while we ate popcorn out of a roaster pan.

If I'd only known the last time would be the last time.

Tenna-Rotor! When the Pittsburgh channels weren't enough, and you needed duplicate channels from Johnstown, Wheeling and Steubenville LOL. I think I could still dial that damn thing without looking at it 50 years down the road.

At the end of that clip, ol’ Larry thanks them “for that spiritual”!

It’s got “sweet Jesus” in the lyrics, so it’s got that going for it!

When I was a teenager I'd practice on my drums while watching the Lawrence Welk Show.
I'd play right along with the band and beat off to the Lennon sisters.