Welk contains much of the stuff of which the old American dream was made. It is clear in the pages of “Ah‐One, Aff‐Two!” as it was before in the best selling “Wunnerful, Wunnerful” that the career of Mr. Welk says, into 36 million viewers.Īs to the reason that is only personal. For this performance there is now a Nielsen rating of 10 million, which translates, as Mr. Welk insists that the line of the melody must come through at all times very clear-very clean and very simple. Today he and his musical family appear every week on 254 stations in this country and 24 in Canada.
Single‐handed he set out to create a network of his own by building a coalition of independent outlets for his program. In 1971, at the age of 68 and alone, he persevered again. On that previous occasion he had persevered. They explained at the time that he was a bumpkin too awkward to make it in the music business. He was jolted, just as he had been jolted years before when, as a young bandmaster, his men had walked out on him in Dallas, S. These young people, it was assumed, were so far out that they were beyond the sound of Mr. It seems he was a victim, among other things, of the “science of demographics,” which had revealed that in the potential American audience the number of young people was growing. In 1971, after 16 years on a national network every Saturday night he was, as he says, fired by A.B.C. Just recently he has had to prove this all over again to those who acquire shrewdness concerning the state of the Union by reading the polls. As to the first, he has never had any doubts about what will play in Peoria -whether Peoria is taken as a city of 125,000 in the center of Illinois or as a state of mind anywhere within the national boundaries.
The second, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, is only personal. The first is attended with the public interest. Lawrence Welk has a claim on the attention for two reasons.