Once a week to a polka beat in a tavern on West Grand Avenue, aches and pains are danced away by children of World War II.
“I call Tuesdays `Polish therapy day,’ ” said 72-year-old Ted Bugielski, a retired machine-shop worker. “I don’t make any doctors’ or dentists’ appointments for that day. Look at them out there on the dance floor. This music is better than all the pills and prescriptions in the world.”
Dozens of gray-haired couples were whirling around the back room of the Major Hall and Tap to the bobbing and weaving rhythms of a group of equally mature musicians. Tacked to a wall behind the bandstand was a banner in the form of a hooked rug, an offering from some senior-citizen groupie. It announced the nine-piece band as The Pensionaires.
Periodically, the dancers doubled as vocalists for a moving-chorus version of old-favorite lyrics like:
In heaven there is no beer
That’s why we drink it here
And when we’re gone from here
Our friends will be drinking all the beer.
At their stage of life, many of these dancers hear as much truth as poetry in such lines, noted Ed Pytel, the group’s drummer, explaining the format for these Tuesday morning dance parties. For three hours starting at 10 a.m., he and his fellow musicians work their way through a polka song book dating from the 1940s. But the last number of the day is always “Aloha,” for which everyone in the room drapes a plastic lei around their necks.
Shortly after The Pensionaires were formed about a year ago, a woman requested that song, Pytel recalled. Perhaps she remembered it from a honeymoon trip to Hawaii. But it was late, and several band members had packed up their instruments. They promised to play the tune, next week for sure.
“She died before next week,” Pytel said. “In her memory, we always close with the `Aloha’ song.”
These weekly sessions got started because Stan Molick used to get bored during slack time at the Norridge Lanes, a far Northwest Side bowling alley he owned. Evenings, the place was crowded. But mornings, there wasn’t much to do after pushing a broom across the largely deserted alleys.
So Molick brought a concertina from home and started idly pushing and pulling on the bellows of the instrument, a smaller version of the accordion affectionately called a “button box” by aficionados. Jan Placzek, another concertina player, happened to go bowling in Molick’s place, and, discovering the owner was a fellow musician, she asked to join his morning practice sessions. Like Molick, Placzek is self-taught.
“When my brother went off to military service, his button box was just sitting in a closet,” said Placzek, 64. “I picked it up and started picking out tunes.”
Other musicians subsequently found their way to the bowling alley, giving the group its current instrumentation: five concertinas, drums, a violin and a piano, plus a reed player who alternates on saxophone and clarinet. Some had been professional musicians. Others once played semi-pro, holding day jobs but performing weekends in taverns. Most were retired, hence the group’s name.
Word got around the far Northwest Side that polka musicians were to be found at the Norridge Lanes, making it a lodestone for senior citizens from the neighborhood, where many Polish-Americans live.
“Pretty soon, we’d have 150 people coming to hear us,” Molick said. “They’d be dancing up and down the alleys.”
Polka music, he explained, is an all-but-official anthem in Eastern Europe, from where many parents of The Pensionaires’ fans immigrated. A vigorous ballroom dance characterized by three quick steps and then a hop, the polka began as a courtship ritual among the peasants of Bohemia. It found adherents in Germany, too. But in the Old World and the New, the Poles have been perhaps polka’s most fanatic partisans.
Ask almost any of The Pensionaires’ audience if or why they favor the music and you get the same we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident answer.
“Do I like polka?” said Lottie Lech, 75. “Of course. I’m Polish.”
Periodically, the infectious rhythm that is the underpinning of these dances inspires fans to burst forth in a series of high-pitched yips, a kind of Slavic-accented yodeling that polka musicians take as a friendly challenge.
“When they feel the music and start screaming like that, I pour the beat into them,” said Pytel, 72, flogging the cymbals with one drumstick while beating a tattoo on the snare drum with the other.
Some attribute curative powers to the music.
“Whenever I get out to play polka,” said Mitch Alberts, a 77-year-old concertina player who was in the audience, “I swear my arthritis goes away.”
“My husband was moping around the house,” said Jeanne Pytel, the drummer’s wife. “It lifted him out of his depression when he got back to playing drums again.”
Finding a new home
A few months ago, Molick sold the bowling alley to a real estate developer, which might have ended The Pensionaires’ post-retirement gigs, except for the vicissitudes of Chicago weather. When a picnic was rained out at which the group was to play, Alyce Soludczyk, one of the organizers, put in a hurried phone call to Albert Zaucha, owner of the Major Hall and Tap.
“Albert said the tavern was half empty, so we packed up the Polish sausage and hot dogs, and 300 people plus the musicians piled in to his back room,” Soludczyk said. “My father made us kids learn to dance the polka at the age of 2.”
That picnic in a barroom proved so successful that Zaucha and the musicians decided to make it a weekly event. Admission is $2, and for another $2.50 polka fans can lunch on ham sandwiches and macaroni salad. The Tuesday dances end at 1 p.m., so dancers can beat rush-hour traffic back to the suburbs, where some now live.
Most of The Pensionaires fans grew up in the city’s older Polish communities: the Division and Milwaukee area, Bucktown and Logan Square. So these weekly parties break down into dozens of nostalgic reunions, as, on wings of yesteryear songs, dancers mentally return to the streets of their youth.
“These are the people from World War II,” said concertina player Harry Tofel, 76, as he and the band swung into a polka version of a Glenn Miller song.
In the 1940s, Tofel recalled, Division Street from about Ashland to Damen Avenues was so thick with taverns featuring polka bands that the strip was locally known as the Polish Broadway. Friday evenings, bartenders would cash paychecks for patrons, many of whom came directly from nearby factories to release the tensions of the work week on a dance floor.
On the side streets were the church halls where the community gathered for weddings, christenings and first communions. In those days, such were marathon affairs, open to all ages.
“Now, people send you a wedding invitation saying: `No children please,’ ” said Jeanne Pytel. “In the old days, that would go straight into the trash.”
At the end of an evening, the hosts of the celebration would pack up the leftovers and carry them home. Guests and musicians were invited to come along, so the party could keep on going.
“In Polish, we call that a poprawiny,” said Alyce Soludczyk. “It would go on for two or three days, until they’d run out of the food and drinks they’d brought back from the church hall.”
That tradition, noted Hank Offman, enabled him to become a musician. Offman grew up in Radisson, Wis., where the Polish community celebrated similarly prolonged weddings. Fascinated as a child by musicians, Offman would hang around the bandstand, waiting for a player to tire, so he could sit in with the band.
“Our local concertina player drank more than the drummer did,” Offman recalled. “That’s how I came to play concertina.”
Magical music
Times were tough when The Pensionaires and their fans were growing up. The Depression segued directly into World War II, a conflict whose effects were felt earlier on Division Street than in some other parts of Chicago.
“In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and everyone was worried sick about relatives in the Old Country,” Tofel recalled. “Then came Pearl Harbor and boys from the neighborhood went off to the service.”
“But even when the going was rough,” added Jeanne Pytel, “there is something about polka music that makes people happy. It’s got a magic that helps them forget their problems while they’re dancing.”
Mitch Alberts took the magic with him when he was drafted. Stationed in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II, he accompanied traveling troups of USO entertainers on an accordion he had brought from home. He also played solo during Japanese air raids.
“They bombed the hell out of us,” Alberts said. “It took the guys’ minds off it, hearing me play a few polkas on that little accordion.”
Ed Nowak, another member of The Pensionaires, was walking down the streets of Naples in 1943, when something in a shop window caught his eye. He had just taken part in the 5th Army’s invasion of Italy.
“There it was in a little music store, a beautiful accordion,” said Nowak, 73. “I bought it for $7 American money and tuned up by playing `Beer Barrel Polka’ for the guys in our outfit.”
Sometime between then and now, though, the concertina and the accordion lost their hold on a younger generation, fans of The Pensionaires report. Few of their grandchildren have much feeling for polka. Their music is rock and disco.
Ellen Lech, 24, recalled being slightly embarrassed as a child when her father would play his accordion. Polka seemed old-fashioned to Lech, a law student at Tulane University who was visiting her grandmother, Lottie.
“Now that I see the joy in this music, I want to dance, too,” Lech said. “The clubs my friends and I go to are part of a singles scene where everybody is busy trying impress each other. Nobody is relaxed, just being natural.”
The weekly farewell
By contrast, The Pensionaires and their fans have long since learned that it’s silly to fight the hand life deals you. Ed Pytel, for instance, recalled that, because of a bum leg, he continued to play on Polish Broadway right through World War II. Some evenings he’d look out from behind his drum set to see lots of girls dancing with each other. Their boyfriends and fiances were away in the military.
“Now we’re seeing that again,” Pytel said. “The men go first.”
On the Major Tap’s dance floor a number of women were partnering each other, taking turns leading and following. Some wore lace blouses much like the ones they might have sported during their courting days. When the band finished the last polka of the day, a concertina struck up a button-box approximation of a Hawaiian guitar’s cords. Everyone rushed to pluck a lei from a cardboard carton perched on the bar. Then all they gathered in front of the bandstand-married couples, widows and widowers alike-to sway back and forth.
“Alloa-ha-ai,” they sang, arms stretched overhead. “Allo-ha-ai. Allo-allo-allo-ha-ai . . .”
