On January 16, 2010, friends and family members of World Concertina Congress Hall of Fame member, Lester Bondowski, helped him celebrate his 80th birthday. Lester started playing the concertina around the age of 15 and is still playing strong. There was a lot of music provided by such guests as Tyler Sawall, Ron and Marlene Lech, Art Altenburg, Paul Kramas, Dan Gruetzmacher, Marlin and Mary Novitzke, Cheri Wogsland, Greg Laabs, Tom Bondowski, Jim Schulz, Jim Soufal, Alvin Birr, Justin Malueg, Lucy Kramas, Joe Schwartz, Jeff Severson, Larry Hartl, Gene Schwartz, Dan Hofmann, Don Winthrop, Mike Hess, Adolph Paholke, Cliff Schimmelphfenning, Abbey Bondowski and Kersten Thibodeau.

01/2010 - Back to Top

Last fall, the masterful concertina musician, Matt Rosinski, celebrated his 21st birthday in grand style. Check out the fantastic concertina-shaped cake made by his Aunt Sandy. It perfectly matches Matt's Star Concertina! What a shame to cut this cake, but word is that it tasted as great as it looked.

01/2010 - Back to Top

[Editor's note: This story is derived from an article that was originally published on MPR News, December 21, 2009.]

St. Paul, Minn. -- Minnesota is a sort of living history museum for a member of the accordion family called the concertina. Concertina clubs, concertina jam sessions and even concertina makers can be found across the state.

Dennis Wolter, a retired back hoe operator from Excelsior, said accordion music is usually upeat.

"It's happy music; there's no sad music in polka waltz music," he said. "If there are they just don't get played."

While Wolter plays the concertina, his friend Vern Schluelter, a farmer from Arlington, plays the button box accordion, a more common but less refined instrument. Schluelter said the music can keep people friendly, at least for awhile.

"I've never seen a fight break out while they're dancing. It's after, during intermission," he said.

The monthly jam session of the Minnesota Concertina Club held every second Saturday in the Glencoe community room next to the town library.

Jeannie Enabnit, one of the ringleaders of the monthly jam, is a keeper of the concertina. She is also the president and editor of Button Box America!, the club and the newsletter as well as "The Concertina Connection," newsletter, publications that reach readers in 30 states.

Jeannie organizes the button box jam session every month in Glencoe which also attracts concertina players.

Enabnit is a player herself and a sort of moderator of the jam as she calls on one of the ten or so gathered squeezers to supply a tune. She said she works to keep the music alive because it moves people--literally.

"It's traditional; it's personal," she said. "It's something that's not a pay to view. It's not a spectator sport."

That's for sure. In the room, no toes can resist tapping when waltz or polka music is played and very often dancing breaks out. So if not world peace, polkas and waltzes contribute to this country's massive need to burn off calories.

Just as Dennis Wolter remembers the dancers from days gone by.

"Everybody worked hard then, and then you could work all day and dance all night and now you don't see that much anymore," he said.

LaVern Rippley, a professor at St. Olaf College, chronicled the concertina's journey across the ocean from Germany to Chicago to Minnesota in a book. The instrument and the music supplied a link to the old country for the Chicago stockyard immigrant workers living in nearby neighborhoods.

Rippley said the workers, in many cases, were so poor they rented out rooms on an eight hour basis.

"[They] had three shifts sleeping in the same bedroom and then [enjoyed] the concertina in their little bit of leisure time," he said.

Rippley has long since dropped his scholarly objectivity about the concertina, in part because because his ten-year-old granddaughter is a talented concertina player.

That's why Rippley is optimistic the folk art surrounding the concertina is not dead, a notion the Minnesota Concertina Club bolsters with each note they squeeze out of their instruments.

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