Word: polkaing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...receive a Phi Beta Kappa key and an honorary doctorate of laws. He took lunch at the home of the university's tall, grey-haired President Frederick Middlebush. Afterward in the living room he got a new round of laughter and applause by playing the Jenny Lind Polka as a piano duet with his sister, birdlike, 60-year-old Mary Jane Truman, and by giving her a brotherly poke with his elbow for making a mistake in her chording...
...farmer bent his back in the June sun and worked the land. He labored wherever the earth lay open, the rain fell and the sun shone-from the lumpy flats of Aroostook County, Me., where the summer potatoes germinated in their dirt hills, to California's Imperial Valley, polka-dotted by the gold of new oranges and ripening honeydews...
Chubby, slick-haired Frank John Yankovic, 34, has had a way with old-fashioned polkas ever since he got his first accordion from his Slovenia-born parents at the age of nine. But he has also had some ideas of his own. Since he organized his own outfit more than ten years ago, he has turned out polka versions of popular tunes and folk songs, besides playing such polka-circuit standards as My Wife Is Happy and Hurray Slovenes...
...combining two accordions, a banjo, bass fiddle and piano with two solovoxes, he made music that sounded good to a lot of people who would not have listened twice to old-style polka bands with their hard-blowing brass and woodwinds and their um-pa-pa .beat. Frankie also managed to please polka experts. In 1948, when his polka version of the hillbilly ballad Just Because became a national bestseller (more than 1,000,000 records), Frankie's popularity began spreading outside his old beat...
Says Frankie: "I want to see how far the polka really can go. There's no reason why polkas shouldn't be just as popular as rumbas...