Welk, who paid the minimum union scale to his cast. Still others left the show over money disputes with Mr. 'He didn't want to let go of his little girls, but by then we all were married and between us had eight children of our own,' Kathy Lennon said. Welk in 1968, to the bandleader's dismay. 'We'd be skipping around toadstools singing 'Here Comes Peter Cottontail' while our friends at school were listening to the Beatles,' Ms. He wanted to give people music he thought they could understand, and he didn't think they could understand Beatles songs or Stevie Wonder songs. 'As we got older - into our teen-age years and then into our 20s - we wanted to do more sophisticated, more popular music,' said Kathy Lennon, who was 12 when she and her sisters joined the show in 1955. His reward came from his audiences, those who could not wait for their weekly taste of 'uh-one and uh-two' accompanied by a succession of Champagne Ladies, accordionists and talented instrumentalists. It was safe-and-sane TV entertainment, painfully predictable and stable and wholesome.įor that, he went virtually without praise from within the TV industry itself.

Welk's criteria for success was to keep it sweet and simple: play the proven standards the people want to hear, in the simplest of arrangements, and in less than three minutes just in case someone did not like a particular song. As recently as 1988 Welk could be heard cueing his band with his 'uh-one and uh-two' signature countdown on weekly rebroadcasts of his television shows on PBS outlets throughout the country.

Welk and his bubbling music-makers were a television staple for 36 years, making their debut in an era when Arthur Godfrey, Groucho Marx, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners were at the top of the Nielsens.

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