Accordions!

Accordion Story

When I was a kid, I loved my accordion. What else provided a girl from North Minneapolis with so many opportunities and room to breathe? Squeezebox lessons began in the third grade and after a year or so of my father’s driving me downtown to the Traficante accordion school on 8th and LaSalle, I got to take the 8A bus on Saturday mornings and kick around downtown on my own. My 4th grade boyfriend and I even once rendezvoused at Woolworth’s where he paid a quarter for an engraver to etch an ID bracelet with “Susie” and a big heart. What girl could ask for more? Then there was the kids’ band at the accordion school over north on 21st and Emerson. Besides a mouth-breathing bunch of us from the neighborhood, there was a boy from the burbs who hosted swimming pool parties out in Golden Valley. That beat walking the four miles up and back to the Camden pool for a swim on a hot day.

Children’s Accordion Band–squeezyboy. blogs.com/squeezytune/2006/04 March 2006

11 proved to be a very good year. I appeared on Channel 11 at 11:00 on Toby Prin’s Saturday morning talent show for kids. And that summer, all of us kid accordionists (how many? 35? ) got loaded into an orange bus for the world accordion competition in Chicago. A mean 14-year old did wake me at 2 A.M. in our Palmer House room, telling me it was time to hurry up and play, but the gods exacted revenge upon her when her first period appeared on her khaki shorts on the bus ride home. A girl in our back row also threw up, so to fill her chair, the band leader took the reeds out of an accordion and propped it up with a dummy player. Boy, that girl really got into playing air accordion,  fingers gliding through our repertoire without a single klunker. Yes, our band did eventually win first prize, but then every other bunch of kids we talked to seemed to have won first prize as well. The biggest thrill of all, however, was the gathering of what felt like a zillion kid accordion-players in Soldier’s field the night after the contest, all of us wheezing out “La Cumparsita” in the candlelit dark as horns tootled and 4th of July fireworks smithereened the edges of our world. Such high ecstasy! Gangs of exhausted kids stood absolutely united, squeezeboxes strapped on their chests.

Photo by Ellen Ferguson

Mostly, though, during the early years, the accordion gave me room to breathe. There were few private spaces in our stucco-ed house on 24th and Aldrich North. None of us girls, except the youngest, had her own room and that room was like Grand Central, bodies roiling through day and night to the bathroom and kitchen, blow-drying and backcombing, switching up dead hair rollers for live ones when no one was looking.

At night, two sisters and I slept side by side in an unairconditioned, knotty-pined upper room playing endless games of animal, vegetable, and mineral until the woman next door stopped shouting, “You little monisters!” at the kids banging in and out of her back porch. But I got to be utterly and blissfully alone when I practiced the accordion; I could shut all the doors and play and play and play. Hadn’t I in this very room stood up in my crib in the middle of the night, waiting for someone to save me, unable to breathe through the asthma, sure I was going to die, my hands on the bars like a little caged animal? But now in this same room, I had an accordion that could breath for me, could become a pair of lungs for me, the bellows inhaling and exhaling sweet, precious air as I shut my eyes and floated up the Swanee and down the Danube and back up the mighty Mississippi. Yes, there was a big box strapped to my prepubescent chest buds, but was this not better than my cousin Janet’s plight—pinned by polio in an iron lung next to the space heater in a small living room, puffs of breath recorded on an overhead mirror?

My sisters and cousins and me

A live accordion was a necessity in our family. Weddings at the Polish White Eagle Hall with their raucous polka bands and waltz and schottische and butterfly dance were few and far between. And my parents were polka champs at the Belair and Medina dance halls on Saturday nights, having originally found each other in a waltz at the Marigold Ballroom. Now with their own mini-accordionist on tap, friends, neighbors, and relatives could hand-jive their way through a merry chicken dance after long, boring days at the factory.

But then I became a teenager. The message, sotto voce, was for all us sisters to get the heck out of North Minneapolis and make something of ourselves. Arriba y Adelante! I took the Broadway bus over the Mississippi to St. Anthony of Padua, a Catholic girls’ school (now a nursing home). How could one be upwardly mobile dragging an accordion behind her? It was toilet paper sticking to one’s shoes. I learned to keep my bellows shut and started piano lessons at the school’s convent–Scarlatti, Bartok, Mozart, nice enough really–the ever-present smell of cooking cabbage reminding me to sit up straight with my back to the audience, legs no longer spread to support the bellows. No more Frankie Yankovič or Pietro Diero or Blue Skirt Waltz. No more jokes about leaving one accordion in an unlocked car and coming back to find three. I shoved my beautiful, black Titano into the closet, let her molder there, unattended, in the dark. I was not some groovy French musician strolling along the Rue de Nostalgia, Edith Piaf on the brain. I was low-class, laughable, immigrant, something to be hidden. Not one of my classmates in high school ever knew I played the accordion. The closet was a fine and private place, but none I found did there embrace. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my beautiful Titano, my mother selling her for cheap when I was off to graduate school in Madison.

At 31, in Seattle, I found the accordion again. My friend Ellie, a self-taught musician, played a wild organ for Mariners’ games and wanted to learn the squeezebox. Cool? Really? My beloved instrument rose from the dark. A friendly tuba and clarinet joined the ensemble, and we played for free, free, free, partied, partied, partied– around Lake Washington and Lake Union and out the Ballard locks and over the waves to Vancouver and the magnificent Empress Hotel. Who could deny the joy we felt after so many years of silence.

Today, I share a house with three sunny accordions. There’s my dear little 72-bass Gabbinelli, brought over from Italy with her two sisters, light enough, in the old days, to wedding-stroll with an all-grrrl klezmer band. Last year I bought a white Titano from Donna who played five years in our Polkastra group. And there’s the little beat-up Titano my cousin Roger used to play in his own accordion band. Recently, she’s had such a good time jetting to family weddings in Jamaica and Park City, her accordion case sutured and re-sutured with silver duct tape. In Park City, after I played the Beer Barrel Polka for my nephew’s wedding dance with his mom, a young woman in the restroom asked me,” Just what was that instrument you were playing?” And later, after the chicken dance brought down the house, a dumbfounded youngster asked how in the world I got my fingers to fly so presto, presto, presto over the keys.

Kids at the Farmers’ Market

Vision of the Future

Interested in the picture of the old Traficante Orchestra up top?  Search the Minnesota Historical society at this address: http://search.mnhs.org/index.php?q=accordian+traficante+orchestra)