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LOST DREAMS  That's our Len Klempnauer, in the middle of the accordion ensemble shown playing at a Knotts Elementary School variety show in Kansas City, Mo., in 1945. Despite his obvious stage presence, Lawrence Welk passed up the opportunity to hire Len on the spot. |
Len blew his chance to be
a tap-dancing Dick Contino
of TheColumnists.com
If my late mother, bless her heart, had been able to command the heavens, her two oldest children would have become the second coming of Fred and Adele Astaire.
Although she tried her best to inspire us to reach for the stars, we exhibited less talent in the performing arts than the wannabees who flunk the “American Idol” auditions.
Not that she didn’t try her best to equip us for stardom, for our mom had all the traits of the quintessential stage mother. But the music lessons and dancing lessons my parents probably could ill afford during World War II never paid off. Neither fame nor fortune was in our stars. We were born with two left feet, tin ears and monotonic voices.
Sometime in 1944 in Kansas City, our mother enrolled my 6-year-old sister Marcia, who was two years my junior, in dancing lessons and me in accordion lessons. Why the accordion, I don’t know, except maybe it was the least expensive instrument to buy and maybe the easiest to learn to play. More likely it came in some package deal that included lessons. Or maybe because Kansas City resides in Missouri, which then boasted more people of German ancestry than any other state, and what would a German Fest be without a band featuring accordions?
Once a week for about a year, my mother would dutifully but jauntily traipse the four blocks to hop on a streetcar for the journey to some building downtown for our lessons. Marcia and I tagged along, she toting her ballet and tap shoes and I lugging my accordion protectively ensconced in its case. On arriving at our destination, my sister would be dropped off in one studio and I in another.
As my group lessons progressed week by week, I didn’t. My personal villain was named “Practice.” I fell further and further behind the rest of the class as I practiced less and less as the months went by. The call of the outdoors--my friends calling from outside the livingroom window wondering when I could come out to play--weakened an already anemic desire to practice.
What eventually did me in, however, and finally convinced my mother that I wasn’t the prodigy she thought was a song titled “Don’t Fence Me In,” popularized in 1944 by crooner Bing Crosby, accompanied by the Andrew Sisters. Everybody else in the beginning accordion class had mastered it. But I never did get it.
I guess this 8-year-old wasn’t about to be fenced into the livingroom, strapped to an accordion every afternoon when there were so many adventures to experience outdoors.
Nevertheless, I did make one public appearance--at a Knotts Elementary School variety show as part of an accordion ensemble in 1945. But there wasn’t a future Dick Contino among us. I can’t remember what song we played, but I can still finger all the notes of the “Marine’s Hymn,” the only piece that has stuck with me 60 years later.
But my mother didn’t give up easily. After we moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., in early 1946, she enrolled Marcia and me in a dance studio for private tap and ballet lessons when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. I must have been more into dance than the accordion. In a sixth grade assignment, “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up,” I wrote that I wanted to be a professional dancer. (My mother saved almost every piece of memorabilia from school that I ever brought home.)
As a dancing duo, Marcia and I were the hit of the Fort-Barka School of Dance’s spring recital in 1947. We performed a Dutch dance, outfitted in Dutch costumes including real wooden shoes. I can’t remember where the shoes came from, but I can remember they were really uncomfortable.
Marcia clogged out from stage right and I from stage left, and I was supposed to be tempting her to join me as a partner at center stage. The fair young maiden was not to be tempted lightly, according to the choreography, so I was supposed to entice her by pulling a string of link sausages from my pocket and beckon her toward me by offering them as a gift.
As I dangled the sausages in front of her, my sister was supposed to accept them and stuff them in a pocket. But those sausages had been out of the refrigerator so long by the time we went on stage that they were slimy and reeked to the highest of heavens.
Marcia adamantly rejected my bribe, and kept shaking her head “no.”
As the music continued and we improvised our routine without joining up as rehearsed, I kept thrusting the sausages toward her face, but she kept shaking her head. Out of desperation, I threw the sausages into the wings. That one little gesture of futility brought down the house, and our otherwise routine routine became the unintentional hit of the show. If we didn’t get the most applause that night, we did draw the biggest laugh.
It wasn’t practice that finally did me in as the next Fred Astaire. What did it was the splits. It hurt like hell trying to stretch my legs sideways from my body while trying to sit on the floor. Girls seemed to be able to accomplish that maneuver, but it’s not a natural act for young boys. That’s my excuse, anyway. To be honest, what really ended my career before the footlights were baseball and football and basketball. I could catch and throw a baseball and football and shoot a basketball much better than I could dance.
About five years ago I asked my sister what she thought about our childhood dancing abilities. Her answer made it unanimous: “We didn’t have any talent,” she agreed.
I can only thank my lucky stars that there was no TV then or I’m sure my mother would have done her best to get us on Bravo’s “Show Biz Moms & Dads.” The world was better off without Bravo in the 1940s. At least my world was.
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The photo
at top is the property of the author. All rights reserved. This
column first posted Aug. 28, 2006.
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