Now the Public Can Be Privy to a Bit of Lawrence Welk Lore

Uh-one and a uh-two. Or: It’s wunnerful to be from North Dakota.

There’s no dispute that Lawrence Welk, now 87 and semi-retired, has had his share of honors.

Take a squint at the lobby of the Lawrence Welk Theatre north of Escondido, which is part of the Lawrence Welk Resort on Lawrence Welk Drive.

The theater lobby is the family authorized Lawrence Welk Museum: gold records, plaques of appreciation, presidential proclamations and more. Outside is a bronze statue of the Champagne Music Maker.

But now even the official Welk cult has been one-upped.

A save-our-heritage group in North Dakota has announced plans to spend $250,000 to renovate the Welk farm in Strasburg (population 600), where Welk lived until age 21.

The governor came down from Bismarck to bless the project and listen to some German polkas. Welk stayed in Santa Monica but sent a warm telegram.

The renovation will include the Welk family’s sod house, granary, buggy barn and outhouse. Repeat: outhouse.

I suggest that anyone whose youthful privy is considered a cultural landmark has soared indeed to an impressive height.

Sharon Eiseman, executive director of Welk Heritage Inc., explained from Strasburg that the outhouse is important. Without it, the verisimilitude of a real farm would be kaput.

It’ll be a working one-seater, with a mail-order catalogue hung on a hook. Such catalogues were a link to the outside world for the Welk family and other German-Russian settlers, Eiseman noted.

It has not been recorded whether Welk was reading a catalogue when he was inspired (in 1927) to form the Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra and head for WNAX-radio in Yankton, N.D.

I’ll leave that to the biographers.

Masked Man Rides Again

Public affairs.

* Who was that politically active masked man?

John Hart, 75, a retired actor who played the Lone Ranger on television for two seasons in the 1950s, is living in a mobile-home park in Warner Springs.

He’s joined his neighbors in opposing the county plan for a garbage dump in nearby Blue Canyon.

To help fund the fight, Hart is selling autographs at $2 each.

* U.S. District Judge John Rhoades holds the key to San Diego’s political future as he decides whether the City Council’s redistricting map is a fraud.

But even Rhoades is not all-powerful.

When a Chicano Federation attorney asked him to review videotapes of a council session to check for slippery dealing, Rhoades admitted he’s never mastered the VCR:

“You’re going to have to clue my wife on what you want me to watch.”

* Pay me now, pay me later.

Rick Taylor and Jean Andrews are partners in a San Diego political consulting firm.

Taylor helped draw the proposed redistricting map that could put Councilman Bruce Henderson’s career greatly in doubt. The map may have delighted Linda Bernhardt (another Taylor-Andrews client) but it made Henderson howl in pain.

Now Andrews is making fund-raising calls for Henderson.

She’s telling people that the redistricting map makes Henderson so vulnerable that he needs all the campaign help he can get.

Going for the Gold

If anyone asks.

* The San Diego Sockers just won another championship.

Not the indoor pros from the Sports Arena. A semi-professional team from Balterswil, Switzerland, wearing blue-and-gold Socker uniforms from a store in Lemon Grove.

For winning the all-Europe tournament in Austria, the team got a pewter plate and a pig.

The plate went in the trophy case. The pig was roasted and consumed at a banquet.

* Headline in the Valley Center Roadrunner: Planning Commission Spends Hours on Minutes.