The Midwest Farmers Daughter: In Search of an American Icon

Chapter Six: Welk Girls and Daisy Dukes

117 The day after Thanksgiving in 1950 my grandmother’s family, the Puffers, made headlines in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Writ large across the top of page was a picture of a bustling family of six staring intently at a Cold War-era box with its space-age screen. The set was switched off, but my relatives—Uncle Donny and his wife Edith, my great-grandparents, and young cousins Phil and Steve Puffer—dutifully posed as if glued to the tube. Under the image of the captivated Middle American family, the caption read, “For farm families, whom both work and weather may confine to their rural homes during the winter, TV will unfold like a magic carpet. Here, the Puffer family, living two miles southwest of Mechanicsville, gathers around its set.” It’s a picture of contrasts. There’s the family patriarch, Big Daddy, clad in overalls, reclining in an overstuffed chair in the middle of a traditional midwestern living room with its wood floors and rails, its floral wallpaper Chapter SIX WELK GIRLS AND DAISY DUKES CHAPTER SIX 118 and Persian rugs, newspapers and magazines stacked high beside him, a remnant of a print era soon to be eclipsed. On the photo opposite my clan’s in the Gazette, Mrs. M. J. Barnes, the wife of the Vinton, Iowa, mayor, was shown gathering her four children in front of the set, including what the caption described as “the fascinated boy” of the family, Hughie. Below the Barnes clan was another snapshot, this one showing a family in front of a big wood-trimmed console; the only one looking at the camera was the dog, which the newspaper captionist wryly noted had little interest in the “new-fangled contraption.” “In ever-increasing numbers, eastern Iowans are buying TV sets,” the Gazette reported. “Among the hundreds of TV set owners and watchers in eastern Iowa, those on this page are perhaps representative of the farm and city groups who are scanning the screens.” Eastern Iowa farm families like mine had just three principal stations to choose from in 1950, the year my father was born—WHBF-TV, Rock Island; WOC-TV, Davenport; and WOI-TV, Ames. Just ten years earlier Cedar Rapids enjoyed its first real taste of a mass-market media frenzy when Major Edward Bowes announced he would salute the city to a Columbia Network audience numbering 35 million . When the city learned that no locals were scheduled to appear on the program, Charles “Pud” Moel, a lyric tenor who lived at 1518 North Street Northwest in the old cereal town, was hastily summoned and shipped off to New York for an audition. A breathless Gazette article announced, “60 of the fastest telephone operators available in the vicinity would be hired to tabulate Cedar Rapids votes for favorite amateurs.” While Moel didn’t win the “Amateur Hour” that Thursday in 1940, the mayor declared “Major Bowes” day in Cedar Rapids. The Hawkeye State had cast its media vote for one of its own, an underdog in every sense, and had relished every mass media minute of it. In 1956 the Czech town on the banks of the Cedar River lucked out again with news that a new network TV sensation, ABC’s Lawrence Welk, would make Cedar Rapids a stop on a two-week tour of one-night bandstands . The up-and-coming farmer’s son from Strasburg, North Dakota, had married Fern Renner at the Cathedral of the Epiphany in Sioux City, and Iowans remembered him fondly for it. A congratulatory ad taken out by Cedar Rapids ABC affiliate KCRG in 1955 saluted: “The Lawrence Welk 119 WELK GIRLS AND DAISY DUKES Show has brought an unusual avalanche of mail from KCRG-TV viewers of all ages praising it on behalf of the entire family.” The show aired at 7 p.m. on Saturday nights, by which time many hard-working Heartland farm families had finished their day’s tasks and were ready to relax. A Midwest farmer’s son, Lawrence Welk was a Saturday night institution across the Corn Belt. My mom, whose own German mother and Czech father counted themselves among Welk’s entourage of farm family boosters, looked forward to Saturday night as a welcome break in what she, coming of age in mid-1960s, considered farm tedium. “Saturday night, if we had a fun night, came closest to family time,” my mom...