BY LISA HOLEWA
Associated Press Writer
TAMPA, Fla. — Frankie
Yankovic, the accordion-playing
Polka King from Cleveland who had folks rolling out the barrel and asking who stole the kishka for generations, died at his home Wednesday. He was 83.
Yankovic wowed dance-hall crowds throughout the Midwest for more than 60 years with his rollicking, toe-tapping performances, won the first Grammy ever awarded for polka in 1986 and more recently reached a whole new generation by teaming up with TV’s Drew Carey and “Weird Al” Yankovic, who was thought to be a distant relative.
“His appeal, it was the same thing as Elvis Presley,” said Joe
Miskulin, a Nashville recording artist who started playing with
Yankovic at age 13. “You saw a guy who came from very poor beginnings achieve exactly what he wanted to do. He had charisma. He’d walk through the dance floor and you’d watch heads turn and everyone want to touch him.”
Yankovic fell last week at his home in New Port Richey, near
Tampa, and was briefly hospitalized. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
Yankovic was the best-known practitioner of Slovenian-style polka, which is heavy on the accordion, clarinet and saxophone. Polish-style polka features accordions and trumpets and has a faster beat.
“The beat that I gave it was different. It was acceptable to teen-agers as well as the older folks,” Yankovic said. “I took the real old-time polkas and modernized them.”
Yankovic had his two biggest hits in the late 1940s. His signature polka, “Just Because,” sold more than 1 million copies in 1948, as did “Blue Skirt
Waltz” the following year.
His other hits included “In
Heaven There Is No Beer,”
“Dizzy Day Polka,” “Accordion
Man Waltz,” “Champagne Taste
FRANKIE YANKOVIC
Dies in Florida and a Beer Bankroll” and his version of “Beer Barrel Polka.”
On his album “Songs of the
Polka King, Volume 2,” which this year earned him his fourth
Grammy nomination, Yankovic teamed up with the song parody king “Weird Al” Yankovic for a version of “Who Stole the
Kishka.”
A tune about the theft of a sausage (pronounced keesh-
KA), the song includes the verse:
“Round and firm and fully packed, it was hanging on the rack. Someone stole the kishka!
Won’t you bring it back? Hey!”
The album also included a duet with Carey. The tubby fellow Clevelander joined
Yankovic for the “Too Fat
Polka,” which proclaims: “I don’t want her, you can have her!
She’s too fat for me!”
Yankovic earned a reputation as polka’s iron man by playing for hours on his feet, tapping his toes and squeezing his hefty accordion, while others played while seated.
More recently he had given in to the limitations of age and health and started performing while seated, though reluctantly. In January, he missed a command performance at
Washington’s Kennedy Center after undergoing heart surgery.
Yankovic was born in Davis,
W.Va., in 1915. His family moved to Cleveland when he was 5 months old. When he was 9, he began playing a friend’s button-box accordion.
His parents got him a piano accordion when he was 15, and he began playing socials in
Cleveland’s ethnic neighborhoods.
BY DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer
NEW YORK — ABC News killed a proposed “20/20” story about alleged security problems at Disney World in Florida.
Officials said the network’s corporate parent, Walt Disney Co., had no say in the decision.
ABC News Chairman David
Westin stopped the segment without talking to network or
Disney executives, spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said. The story “did not work,” she said.
“The fact that the piece concerned Disney was not the reason it did not make air,” she said.
Publishers of “Disney: The
Mouse Betrayed” agreed to give investigative reporter Brian
Ross exclusive access to research in their book before it was published. The book alleges that Disney World doesn’t perform security checks to prevent the hiring of sex offenders and fails to aggressively prosecute pedophiles found in the park.
Disney representatives say the book is full of errors, that
Disney World helps prosecute pedophiles and makes thorough background checks on employees. Spokesman Tom Deegan said Disney executives had nothing t do with Westin’s decision.
“ABC News makes its own decisions about what it covers and what it runs,” Deegan said.
“Nobody at Disney has any say in that. That’s just standard practice.”
While ABC was investigating theme park safety in general, much of the story’s focus came to be on problems at Disney
World in Orlando, said Peter
Schweizer, who wrote the book with his wife, Rochelle, and worked with Ross.
“There is no doubt in my mind the fact that it was Disney was what killed the story,” Schweizer said.
Ross did not return two telephone messages left at his office on Wednesday.
ABC’s willingness to work with the publishers on a story that could have been critical of
Disney is a sign of the network’s independence as a newsgathering unit, even though the report hasn’t aired, Murphy said. No decision has been made on whether it will ever air.
Westin was aware of the agreement when it was made, she said.
Murphy would not specify what was wrong with the story.
“I think ABC has run into an understandably sticky situation,” said Peter Vigilante, vice president of Washington-based
Regnery Publishing. “Their record in general is as a great news organization. I hope that they can work things out and that we can work with them in the future.”
For now, Vigilante said he’s talking with CBS’s “60 Minutes” about the book’s allegations.
BY DAVID BAUDER
AP Television Writer
NEW YORK — The raucous satire “All in the Family,” which ran on network television for years in the 1970s without any viewer alert, can’t make it onto the air in 1998 without a parental warning about content.
The Nickelodeon cable network this week is running several episodes a night of the comedy that made Archie Bunker a national symbol of befuddled bigotry.
Before each night’s marathon, a voiceover explains that “All in the Family” was “always a satire intended for mature viewers and because it contains bigoted remarks, racial epithets and adult subject matter, Nick at Nite has rated the show PG for dialogue and language. Parental guidance is suggested.”
The sitcom’s executive producer, Norman Lear, said the warning is an example of political correctness in the television industry. It was “unnecessary, maybe even foolish.
“The American people have told us loud and clear that they recognize this as enough of themselves not to be disturbed by it,” Lear said. They could hear the same language “at any schoolyard or parking lot adjacent to a church. It isn’t uncommon American language.”
Nickelodeon included the warning because the nightly “All in the
Family” episodes are preceded directly by programming for children, spokesman Paul Ward said.
The network generally runs old sitcms after 9 p.m. EDT on weeknights, and “All in the
Family” contains more adult-oriented subject matter than most of those comedies, he said.
When the show first aired in
1971, the first eight episodes were introduced with a preamble explaining that the show sought to throw a humorous spotlight on prejudice. “By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show in a mature fashion how absurd they are,” the statement said.
Lear, who founded the liberal advocacy group People for the
American Way, said he recently screened an episode of “All in the Family” for a class of college students. Half of them had never seen the show before and
“they couldn’t believe what they were seeing and wondered why they couldn’t see anything like it today.”
AL PACINO
Filming in Israel
JERUSALEM (AP) — Al
Pacino has taken to the dusty streets of Arab towns to film
“Man of the People.”
Pacino, on the set Tuesday and Wednesday, plays a “60
Minutes” producer who interviews a leader of the guerrilla organization Hezbollah, the daily Yediot Ahronot reported.
When plans for filming in
Lebanon fell through, mostly
Arab towns in Israel were chosen instead.