Today's Video Link

If you ask someone versed in TV history to name the longest-running programs, they'll probably forget about The Lawrence Welk Show, which began on local TV in Los Angeles in 1951 and, through a maze of syndication and network deals, managed to produce new programs until 1982. And that wasn't the end of it because it lived on in reruns for a long time and may still, for all I know, be on somewhere. None of those episodes would probably look any more dated today than when they were first broadcast. The show always looked like a relic of the past.

Mr. Welk was a bandleader and showman and a very awkward host who never got any better at it. He was, like Ed Sullivan, one of those guys who started in television when most hosts looked stiff and not terribly articulate…then stayed around as more professional people moved into the medium. His on-air malaprops were legendary but much of America found him and his show delightful

Once in a while, Welk would dance — ballroom style — with one of the many dancers he had on his program or with a lady from the audience. Once in a while, he'd play the accordion. It was his specialty but he usually left the real accordion-playing to a gent named Myron Floren who is the soloist featured in our clip today.

I remember watching the show with my parents — which is to say, they had it on and I was on the living room floor in front of the TV reading comic books. And I remember that Welk often featured polka numbers on his show…though not as many as Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade, a similar series with a more polished host and all-polkas, all the time. It seemed like one out of every three polkas on the Welk show was "The Pennsylvania Polka."

Here then is "The Pennsylvania Polka" as performed endlessly on The Lawrence Welk Show. You get a fast glimpse of Mr. Welk before he turns the floor over to his singers and dancers plus Mr. Floren. The word was that the performers on his show were paid as little money as Welk could get away with paying, which may seem difficult to believe. They always looked so happy…