Here's a show I remember from my childhood…and you might if you're around my age (60) and you grew up in Los Angeles. It's Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade, a live weekly show of…well, polka music. I recall watching it with my parents and wondering why Mr. Sinclair was hosting a polka parade since polkas are about playing music and dancing, and he seemed able to do neither.
I only have a vague sense of its history from articles I read a few decades back. Sinclair was a radio personality and was also throughout his career very involved in the programming of stations. He was hosting a radio show where he played polkas — and he apparently studied and knew that genre well…knew every polka record ever made and every polka ever written and didn't just play the same tunes over and over.
His broadasts were popular enough that someone got the idea to do a TV version with live musicians. It was sponsored by Farmer John Sausage and it was good for them because as we all know, people who like polkas buy a lot of sausage. I guess. For a while, Sinclair and his polkas were on Saturday night so that folks could watch Lawrence Welk on the ABC network and then switch over to KTLA Channel 5 and get a bonus helping of music — all polkas, all the time. Welk played occasional polkas but Sinclair didn't mess around with that non-polka crap.
I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that he and his producers would watch Welk's show (this is all live TV, remember) and if Lawrence played a polka they were planning to play, they'd yank it out of their rundown. That is, unless it was "The Pennsylvania Polka" or "Roll Out the Barrel," both of which they played often by request. Many of the acts that appeared on Dick Sinclair's Polka Parade became local celebrities and would get booked into L.A. functions and advertised as "As seen on…"
This episode appears to be from 1957 and if I saw it when it aired, I was five. The TV show went on for some time after but I've been unable to ascertain for how long. I can however tell you when Dick Sinclair stopped hosting a polka show on radio. Answer: He hasn't. At least, the last time I looked, he was still doing it on weekends on Cable Radio Network and it probably sounds a lot like this…