DATELINE: NORTH DAKOTA : Welk Home: Restoration Hits High Note : Never mind the flap over federal funds. The partially restored farm is doing fine on private support.

North Dakota has produced its fair share of celebrities: Angie Dickinson, Eric Severeid, Roger Maris, Peggy Lee, Louis L’Amour. The funny thing is, though, most of them sort of fled the state and never seemed to give two hoots about ever coming back.

Not so Lawrence Welk, who set off with his accordion from this wind-swept prairie town on his 21st birthday, in 1924, became rich and famous as the king of “Champagne music” during a 26-year run on TV and always thought of Strasburg as the grandest place on Earth.

Welk--now 88 and living in retirement in Santa Monica--until a few years ago returned frequently to drink coffee at the cafe on Main Street and greet many of the 600 residents by their first names.

He still sends thousands of dollars a year to support Strasburg’s Catholic Church, high school, nursing home (where his sister, Anna Mary Mattern, lives) and community swimming pool (built with funds from a concert he gave in Minot).

So when Strasburg was looking for a project to help celebrate North Dakota’s centennial in 1989, it made good sense to restore the abandoned Welk homestead in the hope of catching a few tourists traveling Highway 83 en route to South Dakota’s Black Hills.

Plans were laid, private funds raised and ground broken at a ceremony attended by Gov. George Sinner and Atty. Gen. Nicholas Spaeth. The Welk home site opened last May and did better than anyone dared imagine: 6,400 visitors from 50 states have followed the volunteer guides through the farmhouse and six acres of ground that Welk’s parents, Ludwig and Christina, first saw from an ox-drawn wagon in 1893.

A sign on the faded red barn reminds everyone that success was not achieved without a few sour notes. “No federal funds have been used to restore the birthplace of Lawrence Welk,” it reads. “We still need to raise $60,000 to complete the barn. Please help.”

What caused the brouhaha was this: In 1990, Strasburg applied for and won a $500,000 federal grant to build a museum on or near the Welk property to honor the German-Russian immigrants who, like Welk’s parents, settled the region. Strasburg, hurt by drought and falling farm prices, was qualified as part of an economically depressed region.

People here thought the museum was a perfect way to enhance the Welk homestead, boost tourism and tell a largely unknown story about settling the Great Plains.

No sooner had the grant been approved than Strasburg found itself being denounced as an example of government waste and pork-barrel politics. “What will they do for an encore?” asked Rep. Silvio O. Conte (D-Mass.). “Earmark funds to renovate Guy Lombardo’s speedboat? Or restore Artie Shaw’s wedding tuxedo?”

The Pioneer Heritage committee here cringed, because the Welk home site had been restored entirely with private funds--and, after all, everyone asked, weren’t a lot of museums supported by federal funds?

The flap was settled last October, when the Farmers Home Administration announced it would not give Strasburg the grant after all.

“I think we could have won if we’d caused a big stink,” said Evelyn Schwab, Welk’s niece and a member of the committee. “But that takes money, and where are you going to get the money to hire someone to fight the case for you?”

Deterred but not defeated, Strasburg plans to raise the money to complete the restoration. And in a state where weekly reruns of “The Lawrence Welk Show” are among the top-rated programs on PBS-TV, no one is betting against the town. The first item on the March fund-raising schedule is an ethnic dinner on Welk’s birthday in Horner’s pool hall.