On weekends, the Baby Doll Polka Club is a musical extension of the Balkans.
The rest of the time it is just a street-corner bar at 6102 S. Central Avenue tucked behind Chicago`s Midway Airport. Like a lot of neighborhood taverns, the Baby Doll was hollowed out of a bungalow so that the bar now sits where someone`s living room used to be. Toward the back–where maybe some long-ago family gathered around the kitchen table–there is a mini-dance floor, and on Friday and Saturday nights a house band tempts patrons off their stools with the bouncy-beat dance music for which the place is named.
”We call this thing a Slovenian button box, but it`s real name is a harmonika” proprietor Eddie Karosa said strapping on the accordionlike instrument that makes him the leader of the band.
Pushing and pulling on its bellows, Karosa got the harmonika (which is pronounced with a long ”o”) to yield a mournful, wailing sound that instantly transported his audience from a bar on West 61st Street to some central European mountain top. Many decades ago, the instrument that is Karosa`s pride and his audience`s joy made just that journey, albeit in the reverse direction.
”When my dad came over from the Old Country, he brought this button box with him. It used to belong to his father, my granddad, and all in all we figure that it must be about 110 years old,” Karosa said. ”Those old-time Slovenian craftsmen really built things to last. I give it a steady workout, but nothing`s ever broken on it. All I`ve ever had to do was have the bellows changed a couple of times when I wore them out.”
Hollywood`s recording-industry executives may never have heard of the Slovenian button box. But on the Southwest Side–and in similar blue-collar, ethnic neighborhoods across the nation`s industrial mid-section–the harmonika is more than a musical instrument. Not just Eddie Karosa`s hand-me-down, but all button boxes are audible links to their devotees` ancestral traditions.
A couple of decades back, though, the harmonika seemed headed for a minor nitch in some historical museum. In the 1940s and 50s, as an older generation died out, children and grandchildren of central European immigrants started giving up the polka in favor of the top 10 tunes of their all-American counterparts. More recently, however, the balance has been swinging, ever so slightly, in the opposite direction.
Like his dad, Eddie Karosa Jr. learned to play the button box as a kid. Now he travels the Waukegan-to-Joliet, one-night-stand circuit playing the same VFWs and Moose Halls his father did four and five decades ago. Currently, his polka band is staffed with several refugees from rock and roll. ”My drummer and guitarist both started out as rock players, but they eventually got bored with that music,” Eddie Jr. said while taking a little bedtime schnapps at his father`s bar.
Eddie Jr.`s sidemen are not the only members of the rock generation to resonate to the button box`s siren sound. Richard March is traditional and ethnic arts coordinator for the Wisconsin Arts Council, but don`t be fooled by that highfalutin title. At heart, he is still a street-corner kid–a heritage he recently celebrated by authoring a definitive history of the button-box accordian for ”Expressions,” the newsletter of the Chicago-based Institute for American Pluralism.
Born and raised in a Croatian neighborhood on Chicago`s Southwest Side, March had mixed feelings when he was offered his present position. He had always thought of Madison, Wis., where the council is headquartered, as the heartland of yuppie fern-bar culture.
”If there is one kind of music the so-called sophisticates used to hate, it was polka,” March said. ”I guess it`s because polkas and accordions are associated with blue-collar folks.” Lately, though, even some of the Perrier water set seem anxious to make a musical nonaggression pact with their working-class counterparts. When he got to Madison, March was delighted to find that a local watering hole, the Essen Haus, features a polka band on the weekends. Just down the block there is a rock-music hall whose tie-dye-haired patrons have taken to stopping by the Essen Haus as well. In return, the Essen Haus` house band now peppers its late night offerings by running a polka-limbo contest.
”It`s a wild scene,” March says. ”One table will be filled with punkers with pink hairdos, and sitting at a table right across from them will be two couples in their 60s with the men wearing burgundy sports jackets.”
To some polka purists, the accordion`s revival is a mixed blessing. Roy Podboy is founder and director of the 30-member Chicago Button Box Club. For the last 15 years, the members of his organization have been meeting weekly to perfect their ensemble skills on the harmonika. To his way of thinking, Eddie Karosa`s music has been diluted of its Slovenian purity. The Button Box Club`s charter expressly limits members to players who can boast Slovenian ancestry.
”Karosa`s a good musician, don`t get me wrong about that,” Podboy says. ”It`s just that his band doesn`t preserve the old Slovenian folk tunes in their original form like we think it is important to do.”
To that charge, Eddie Karosa in effect pleads guilty.
”My band is one of the few polka outfits that can play in English,”
Karosa said between sets one evening. In fact, on a typical weekend evening, the Baby Doll will rock to the umpah-umpah sounds of polka music from each of the half-dozen central European countries that are represented among the tavern`s regular patrons. Karosa prides himself that he speaks six languages: English, Slovenian, Croatian, Polish, German and Czechoslovakian.
”Slovenian is what my mom and dad spoke at home, and we learned English in public school,” he explained. ”The other languages, I picked up by being 50 years in the tavern business.”
Among Karosa`s biggest boosters is Joseph Kawalec. Nightly, the 85-year-old Kawalec finds his way to the Baby Doll. Watching him escort a half- dozen distaff-side patrons to the dance floor leaves the clear impression that he has taken some kind of personal vow not to do the polka with any partner more than one-third his age. When he runs out of ladies who meet those specifications, Kawalec simply stations himself stage center as a self-annointed vocalist for the house band.
”One night when the place was jammed to the walls I made the mistake of offering Kawalec a microphone,” Eddie Karosa recalled. ”`What the hell do I need that damn thing for?` he told me, pushing away the mike and going right on shouting out the lyrics at the top of his voice.”
”I sing Polish. Eddie, he plays Slovenian. But what does it matter?
All of us in here love polka music, that`s the important thing,” Kawalec said, by way of explaining the Baby Doll`s multiethnic mixing grounds. To reinforce his critical credentials, Kawalec showed a card that establishes him as a member in good standing of the Original 47th Street Concertina Club, one of many local groups of amateurs who devote themselves to preserving polka music in basements on the Southwest Side.
For his part, Roy Podboy willingly confesses that he only lately came to his ethnic-purity standards.
”Back before World War II,” he said, ”when my parents went out to a wedding or some other party, they`d just take us kids with and park us on the bandstand while they were dancing. Somehow I`d always find myself next to the harmonika player, and when the band took a break I`d fool around with the thing. By the time I was 8 years old, I`d picked up enough of it to be able to sit in with most of the bands that played around Waukegan`s Slovenian neighborhood where we lived.”
But then, like some latter-day Walt Whitman, Podboy heard America singing –and it definitely wasn`t to the tune of a button box. A harmonika, he explained, is really just a scaled-up version of its namesake. Like a mouth organ, the same reed sounds differ depending on whether the harmonika`s bellows are pushing air out or sucking air in across the reeds. To Podboy`s adolescent ear the piano accordion–the button box`s historical successor
–which is tuned like other standard band instruments, sounded more modern. So for several decades, he put his button box in the attic and turned his attention to piano accordions on which other Americans were playing ”Lady of Spain” and similar amateur-hour favorites.
Eventually, though, he felt the tug of the music that he had long ago fallen asleep to as his parents danced the polka. In the early 1970s, he dragged his button box out of storage, found that he wasn`t alone in his search for his musical roots, and formed the Button Box Club. Within a few years, the news of their efforts had carried all the way back to the Old Country.
Every year, Yugoslavia, of which Slovenia is a constituent republic, hosts a 4th of July Immigrants Day celebration in honor of its citizens who have gone to live abroad. From Europe and Australia, the U.S. and Canada, Yugoslavians return to their homeland for a mass picnic and musical offering that attracts upwards of 30,000. In 1979, the Chicago Button Box Club was invited to be the first foreign harmonika band to perform on Immigrants Day.
”The concert is given in a great big natural amphitheater, and from the stage we could see thousands and thousands of Yugoslavs,” Podboy recalled.
Looking out into that sea of babushkas, Podboy noticed that some of the old ladies in the front row were dabbing their eyes. Are we that bad? he asked himself. After his group`s performance, he went out into the audience and asked one of the teary-eyed ladies.
”Oh, no, not at all,” the Yugoslav woman responded. ”It was just the opposite. We knew that your parents had left Slovenia for America almost 80 years ago. We thought that by now your generation would have lost all touch with your heritage. So when you started to play ”Srecen Janez” (”Lucky John,” a traditional Slovenian folk tune), we said to each other: `Praise God. Even in America they still remember the home land.` To think that after all these years, you`d come back to play that tune for us.”
Meanwhile, back at the Baby Doll, as the last customers headed reluctantly for the door, Eddie Jr. reminded his father that he had promised to accompany him the next night to a gig at the Joliet VFW.
”We can`t be late because some of the local papers put out the news that you`re coming back to play there with us,” Eddie Jr. explained. ”One of them even said: `Don`t miss this once-in-a-decade chance to hear the Heifetz of the Slovenian button box.` ”
