When I was 12, LW was sheer torture. How I wish Mom could torture me with it now. Mom would be 85 if she were still living, I am 47.
Mom always marvelled at the costuming and both Mom and Dad loved the dancing.
Dad is still going strong at age 87, and he and wife go out ballroom dancing several times a week. god bless him.
And a one and a two
That’s it. Its the utter lack of irony and mountains of cheesiness that make it so special.
I’m 42, and while I really can’t watch it now, I have very pleasant memories of doing so with my parents when I was wee. ::sigh::
53, and can’t imagine ever watching it on purpose – not even for irony or nostalgia. I do remember my dear sweet old Quaker grandmother and two great-aunts gathering around the Philco console to torture me with it, but no residual fondness for them wound up rubbing off on the show.
Apart from the man actually having been Catholic, yeah.
A big part of the appeal was undoubtedly the chance to be a working musician. Besides, by the 1960s, brass and winds had been pretty much been booted out of mainstream rock.
As an interesting bit of trivia, Buddy Merrill, a guitarist with the band in the early 1950s, was one of the first celebrity endorsers of the Fender Stratocaster.
Hey, nobody’s perfect. 
My parents were music lovers, so never watched Lawrence Welk. But it seemed like every time I visited my best friend’s house his mother would be watching either Lawrence Welk or Liberace or Mitch Miller. I’m glad we usually played at my house.
I’ve gotta tell you, I’m 50 and I absolutely hate Lawrence Welk. I had to watch it when I was a kid because my grandmother loved it. (She was born in 1905).
Every once in in a while, I put it on for my kids to watch (14 and 17) to see what I had to put up with when I was a kid. But, I can’t watch it long. It was really horrible. I know the musicians were talented, but it was horrible.
My parents knew if they wanted to clear the living room and be alone, all they had to do was turn on LW. It did the trick every time and it was a sure fire way to get us kids to leave and do homework or just hide.
I occasionally flip it on, just to see how bad it really was. It usually only takes me about a minute to remember why I used to flee the room. But those outfits…OMG…I think the costume designers were stoned back in those days.
One classic Lawrence Welk screw up:
He was introducing the song, “Take The “A” Train” and, reading from the cue card, said, “Now, we will play the song, ‘Take A Train’.”
That’s what you get for being born and raised in North Dakota. 
I find it nostalgic, too (I’m 47). My parents & grandparents all watched it, and I’ll occasionally watch it if I stumble across it on cable.
I can’t find a link, but SNL did the most hilarious take-off on Welk and a pseudo-Lennon Sisters act recently, with the “new chick” Kristin Wiig (forgive if I spelled that improperly) as the sister that was just…not…quite…right.
VCNJ~
I grew up with Lawrence Welk. My grandmother loved it (Welk himself once said that most of his fans seemed to be grandmothers), but she was really his target audience. Welk was trying to recreate those weekend get-togethers in the local Hall featuring Eastern European music and dancing. I was never a fan, myself. My own musical tastes are odd, but never really went to his style, which was more my parents’ and grandparents’ era.
The nuns at my parochial school urged Welk on us as an example of “good music”. To keep us from listening to that awful rock’n’roll, no doubt.
My mother watched it faithfully. I can appreciate the talent of the performers, but that’s about it.
I’m 49. I think my family watched it pretty regularly, but I don’t remember a whole lot about it. Probably I was reading most of the time it was on.
I find it kind of amusing that it’s endlessly rerun on PBS now. During the 60’s it was pretty much exactly the kind of lowbrow mass market programming that PBS was supposed to give you an alternative to.
Heh. Good point. I never noticed that irony before.
Well, I did mention its appeal to me was the lack of irony …
My great grandmother on my father’s side liked it but my mother hated it. Whether this was due to her having extremely limited musical tastes or to disliking everything about my father’s side of the family (including my father) I don’t know.
I can stand to watch it about twice a year before I start screaming. Based on what little I’ve seen of it, the music seems rather bland and soul-less and I find that disturbing.
My grandparents were fans of the Lawrence Welk show, and I was condemned to have to watch it with them when they were babysitting me as a child.
Even when they were doing music that in its original form was half decent, they managed to emasculate and ruin it. Part of the loathsomeness was that every performer was obliged to smile, smile, smile during each number. Even the band was supposed to grin - it was painful to watch a clarinetist attempting to smile during his solo.
I guess this was the show to watch if you thought Mitch Miller was too Satanic-looking.
My PBS station plays it only during pledge periods. They SAY. “Where else but PBS can you get such wonderful programming,” but what they MEAN is, “Pay up or we’ll start playing this crap year round. It costs us nothing and we need to show something to keep the transmitter warm until your kids wake up and we can go back to playing Barney.”
We never watched LW, thank Og. It must have been on Saturday night, though, because we definitely watched Hee-Haw! I think Dad like the T&A, for some reason.
BR-549. 
ETA: (I’m 50.)