Flashback Friday

Betcha your Mom never played the accordion.  The musician of the family was Marj.  She forced us boys to have organ lessons for years from Ila Mae with varying degrees of failure.  Oh those mournful notes of "Long, Long Ago" still pound my brain!  How we managed to sit at that organ and go through the notes in repetition, eventually to stumble through simple tunes?  How Ila Mae managed to sit at that organ with us listening to that vapid, futile exercise?

Dick and Mona denied their daughter little.  Not sure if the need to explore the accordion was her idea or theirs, but here we are with a series of pictures of Marj looking every bit the part of Gus Polinski and the Polka Kings.  

Marj would graduate from the accordion and settle in with the organ, one of which was in our living room as we were growing up. To this day I can do a rousing "We Shall Overcome" but, sadly, Marj's hopes of bringing culture and music to the barbarians were dashed.  Every bit the trooper she carried on, even playing on weekends at the Oak View Country Club lounge area as a kind of guest entertainer.  The routine, as I recall, was to be dropped off at Harry's Flick House in Aledo on Friday nights then taken to the Club till the folks were ready to go home.  This gave us an opportunity to see what adults do.  Marj would sit at the organ and play all the popular current hits of the day.  I even remember her going to the Cities with us boys in the back seat and she would go to a place up there to get new sheet music.

As for the accordion, we never uncovered any instrument of that ilk around the house so her romance with that particular devise may have been brief.  No info on these pictures.  I'm not smart enough to figure out the squiggly info at the bottom.  No 1/3/3?  Number 1, 1933?  Who knows.  If that is true, then we have an 8 year old Marj in these photos.  The series itself is professionally framed and I suppose there could be further info if I were to unwrap the back, which I won't do.   

Marj, to her credit, never stopped trying to civilize the barbarians.  She had to give up hope for us boys as we grew up and left her tutelage, but poor Herb was still around, off and on.  One Christmas she got him a harmonica.  Her grasp as the musician of the family was never threatened.