“In the ‘70s and ‘80s it was doing pretty well, maybe even into the ‘90s, but it’s just slowly started to decline, with those every-week dances on weekends.”Įven polka festivals, long considered immune because of the variety of bands and attractions they offer, are showing the strains. It’s wonderful, but it is challenging to get the younger people involved. There are places with polkas, but it tends to be in the afternoons and catering to an older clientele. “There’d be hundreds of people there, listening to polka music. “When I was growing up, we had weekly dances, and they’d be packed,” she said. Adamczyk is the entertainment chair for Polish Fest in Milwaukee, and she knows polka music is one of the reasons the annual festival continues to grow every year.Įven so, outside of the festival, she has seen the popularity of the music diminish greatly over the decades in the neighborhood dance halls and taverns. You couldn’t add another person with a shoehorn and five gallons of grease. “We used to play for Central Wisconsin, at Schmidt’s Ballroom, and the place was jammed. “There’s the Jolly Mixers at Clintonville, the Happy Hoppers at (Luxemburg), the Central Wisconsin dance club in Wausau-Merrill - these dance clubs all have had the same thing happen to them, simply because they’re part of the old-time crowd, which is old, sick and dying, and the kids are not replacing them,” Laabs said. The music itself, at least in its most traditional format, isn’t doing so hot either, nor are some of the popular venues of yesteryear, Laabs claims. It’s not just the hall of fame that's in its death throes. Now the stuff is packed away in the basement somewhere and the current owners want it out of there. The club has plaques and awards that used to be in display cases at the Chandelier Ballroom in Hartford. They’re very simply old, sick and dying.” “Over the last years, participation has dwindled, not only with the Hall of Fame but with our older crowd of dancers. “There’s not enough kids interested, and not enough are replacing the older crowd that is passing away,” Laabs said. It started offering a three-year membership, but that never generated much interest, and there are only two people left on the rolls whose temporary membership hasn't already expired.Īt that unofficial meeting early in December, a few members expressed some kind of enthusiasm for keeping the organization alive, but there was zero enthusiasm for volunteering to do anything to help, and the meeting sort of broke up without accomplishing anything. It offered lifetime memberships for $100, so once it had its membership of 160 or so, it had no way to continue to raise money. The group made one important organizational mistake, according to Laabs. Nor is there anyone in charge of knowing that or doing that. The group still has lifetime members, but no one knows how many or how to reach them all. There was nobody left to appoint a replacement, and, anyway, no one was willing to step up. Laab was on the board until about a year ago, when his term and another board member's term expired. The culture is changing, and the real question is, will polka music itself survive? Meisner is one of the people who believe it had better adapt to changes in taste or it could find itself becoming a dinosaur musical form. Meisner, as an inductee and lifetime member of the hall of fame, actually has a pretty good idea how it can be. “The Polka! Now we don’t even have a Hall of Fame? How can that be?” “Polka is the Wisconsin state dance,” said Steve Meisner, head of the famous Steve Meisner Band out of Whitewater, a polka virtuoso since age 5, and the son of the even more famous Vern Meisner of the even-more-famous Vern Meisner Orchestra. After nearly a quarter century of promoting the music and honoring the musicians and promoters, the statewide organization appears to be on its death bed, apparently from lack of interest. Witness the impending fate of the Wisconsin Polka Hall of Fame. You can clap your hands and stomp your feet all you want, but it’s appearing that polka music can indeed be beat.
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