Lennon sisters sang “A Hard Day’s Night,” accompanied by a string band, a harmonica, and an accordion.
“Harry, you gotta be kidding,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
“Shush, Federson,” Harry said as Lawrence walked out on the stage wearing a Beatles wig and introduced Joe Feeney, who started singing “Eight Days a Week.”
“But Lawrence Welk? If anyone hears about this around here they’ll expel you from the university. No college student of the ‘70s ever watched Lawrence Welk, especially if he attended SIU.”
“I watch it, Federson; it’s good clean entertainment, so bite me!” Harry sat entranced and watched Joe sing in his piercing tenor voice.
Harry was as mesmerized by this program as he was by Freudian psychology, duck hunting, calculus, weight lifting and the Bible. Yet, I had no idea why he liked The Lawrence Welk Show. Well, now was the time to find out. I broke in during the Geritol commercial.
“Harry, why do you watch Lawrence Welk?”
He looked up from the TV with an expression that indicated this was a new question from his roommate. “No man, it’s personal.”
“What’s personal about watching Lawrence Welk?”
Harry looked out at the rain and shrugged. “OK Federson, I’ll tell you. I was in a gang in East St. Louis when I was a kid, and I got busted on drugs. The judge sent me to the juvenile home, and the only thing the TV could pick up was this one channel. Saturday night was TV night, and at 7:00 was Lawrence Welk. Lawrence was my first lesson on how middle class people behave…”
“But Harry, it’s not really…”
“…real? Yes, I know that Federson. But it was a start. Later, Father Mattingly taught me some manners, and I decided while I was in the home that I’d get straight, no more drugs. I got my GED and applied to SIU a few years later. Meanwhile, I did odd jobs: waiter, sold popsicles, worked in a junkyard, and other stuff. I took a few tests and they found that I had an aptitude for economics, and that’s how I got here, on a scholarship. And it all started with Lawrence Welk.”
That one paragraph was more than I ever known about Harry Smykus. The first time around, we hadn’t really known each other’s histories, because it really hadn’t mattered to us. Harry and I had accepted one another just as we were.
“Harry, you know that had you missed this program, you could see it again and again for years.”
“Fine, Federson, but I want to see it right now, so shut up, the commercial’s ending.”
Yes, The Lawrence Welk Show would follow Harry into the 21st century on rerun after rerun after rerun. I looked again at that Whitman quote taped to the radiator.
Next to it was my class schedule. The clock radio read 7:58…a little more than four hours until tomorrow—four hours until Monday became the present, and I would start improving my grades, my love life, my temper and my future. I would study Dr. Von Reichmann, seek out Catherine, and go to class. But algebra at 7:30 in the morning? No 20-year-old kid should be allowed to schedule his own classes!
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