The PBS station broadcasts a new incarnation of “The Lawrence Welk Show.” It contains clips, usually centered on a theme, from the program that first went on national television seventy years ago. I never watch the whole hour, but I often stop my channel-scanning for ten minutes to watch a bit. I consider it an homage to the father.

We had one television while I was growing up. There were few disputes within the family about what to watch. We generally agreed, but on Saturday nights, I most decidedly did not. If memory serves that is when The Lawrence Welk show aired. I don’t know how my older brother and sister felt about it or my mother, who did not seem to have much say about what to watch (times and families were different). The father’s vote for Welk outweighed all other considerations. He loved it. My alternative choices seemed limited. At age ten or twelve, I did not go out on Saturday nights during the long Wisconsin winters. I wasn’t about to do homework on a Saturday evening. It seemed as if I had no choice but to hear Welk’s bubbly music. I would look over at my father during the show. He would be smiling, and I would silently shake my head.

Numerous variety shows with many musicians were on television during that period. Throughout the Welk era, I might also see and hear Rosemary Clooney, Dinah Washington, Tony Bennett, Louis Prima, Jack Jones, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald. Even to my tender, musically untrained tin ear, I could tell the difference between the music on the Lawrence Welk show and that of those other performers, and that made the champagne music even more painful. But the father insisted on the Welk show and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sometimes he would move his hands as if he, and not Lawrence, were conducting. And I would silently shake my head.

Although the songs on the Lawrence Welk show may have come from different genres—from a Jewish lament to a Broadway show tune, from Stephen Foster to Cole Porter–they all sounded the same. The same was true for the dancing. It all seemed the same — what might be described as perky but sexless with any ethnicity wiped out. Even polkas were homogenized. For those who were clinging to the notion that the country was truly homogenous, Welk was perfect.

Of course, not every act fit precisely into the same mold. Al Hirt and Pete Fountain appeared, and they sounded different, but I had only a mild appreciation for Dixieland. And the Irish tenor stood out from the rest. His maudlin singing came close to making me laugh]. But I would look over at the father and I could swear that I could catch the beginning of a tear. And I would silently shake my head.

There was more than the music on the Welk show, however. Anyone who has seen a few minutes of the show knows that Lawrence himself was strangely awkward though strangely compelling with an easily mockable, indefinable, seemingly middle European accent. Only recently did I learn that my assumption of his foreign birth was wrong. He was a native-born American. His German parents had been living in the Russian empire city of Odessa in the Ukraine before immigrating to the United States in 1892. Lawrence was born in Strasburg, North Dakota, in 1903. Strasburg was a German-speaking town, and Welk, who was as American as American can be, did not speak English until he left the family farm at twenty-one to seek musical fortune as an accordionist and bandleader. Thus, the accent.

Although Welk became a force, he was not a musical influencer. He was most associated with the accordion, both his own and those in his orchestra, but I doubt that he affected the sales of that instrument, which I guess remained tiny outside of polka territory. (This could be contrasted with the sale of electric guitars, spurred by the onset of rock, which was in its formative years when Welk first started appearing on my TV.) I don’t think that many today would claim him as an important influence. Nevertheless, he had an incredible career.

When they could no longer keep him down on the farm, he started touring as the leader of a band. That orchestra had a ten-year residence at a Chicago hotel. He settled in Los Angeles, and he with his musicians were on local television for several years before he was picked up by ABC in 1955. He stayed on that network until 1971. His show was then syndicated for another eleven years. He was on TV for over three decades, and surely nearly all Americans knew who he was.

Surprisingly, he endures. Evidence of his staying power is a new book coming out from the North Dakota State University Press: Champagne Times: Lawrence Welk and His American Century by Lance Byron Richey. It comes in three volumes comprising more than 1200 pages. A limited first edition signed by the author will soon be available for $225. (I doubt the spouse will give it to me for Christmas.)

 An orchestra bearing his name appears in Branson, Missouri, and a version of his shows appears (as noted) on PBS. (This is not a reason to slash the budgets of public broadcasting.) I doubt I saw any of the original shows that the present clips are now drawn from. They are in color, quite a collection of colors, in fact, but Welk only started color broadcasts in 1965. By then I was in college and I assuredly did not watch the show there. When I was home on a Saturday night, I went out. But the die-hard father still watched.

These days when I land on the Lawrence Welk show for a few minutes, I see our modest living room with the family around the television. I look over and see the ghost of the father, smiling, nodding, waving his conducting arm. And I silently shake my head, but now I have my own smile for the one who is long gone.