We seem to be having a debate as to when the song "One Toke Over the Line" came out. I have a lot of e-mails about it but I suspect my old pal Mike Tiefenbacher has it right…
According to 45cat.com (the site to go to to determine such things for any of your future mixtape posts), "One Toke Over the Line" was issued in January, 1971. It first charted in Billboard January 30, which means it was charting locally the week of January 16th. (Like comics, the paper trade magazine cover dates are the off-sale dates, reflecting airplay dates plus the time it took to compile, publish and distribute the magazines to the newsstand; the copyright dates are two weeks prior to the chart dates).
From my personal records, it began charting in Milwaukee February 24. It peaked at #6 in Cash Box and #10 in both Billboard and Record World. One-hit wonders Brewer and Shipley issued five singles before that never charted, while three of the six issued after "Toke" charted in the Top 100, only the immediate follow-up ("Tarkio Road") hitting the top 40 (#39) in Cash Box. The album which included "Toke" ("Tarkio") came out in November of 1970 but only made the charts after "Toke" became a hit in March.
In other words, if Spiro actually made that speech in September of 1970, he was either psychically prescient, or he never mentioned this song. Or that speech came in September of '71. (It's Wikipedia, after all. Every fact has a 50% chance of being right or wrong.)
The Lawrence Welk Show is still shown every Saturday on PBS affiliates in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and I suspect it has been on PBS continuously since the late '80s, though that's only from distant observation and a memory that's become less dependable every year.
Obviously, the most likely explanation here is that the date cited for Agnew's speech is wrong in Wikipedia. Agnew gave a lot of those speeches and someone may have gotten confused as to which speech mentioned the Brewer & Shipley tune. We may find out for sure if/when one of my readers with access to old newspaper databases checks it out.
Incidentally, in the many years of this blog, I have occasionally referred to some recording artist or act as a "one-hit wonder." With the exception of the group Yellow Balloon, that always brings some very angry mail from fans of the recording artist(s) insisting they were not that. So folks, please note that Mike said that. I didn't.