There were the Dutchmen of course, The Six Fat ones and The Skinny variety too.
There were Dutchmen from the Country, from Ivanhoe and from the Riverside.
There were the Jolly Ramblers and the Jolly Huntsmen, the Jolly Lumberjacks and the Jolly Brewers. There were the Cards, the Sidemen, the Polka Dots, the Echos, the Moonlighters… and dozens more.
All told, Myron Wolf (CHS 1955) has played saxophone or clarinet with 46 different polka and old-time bands. Today, at age 87 and despite a couple of health setbacks, he is still going strong, playing tenor saxophone for the Mary Guentzel Quintet.
The group’s most recent performance was under a tent in downtown Elysian on Saturday (above).
“Our band members have said they consider it an honor and a privilege to work with such an accomplished musician,” Guentzel said. “He’s so talented and is always striving for perfection but has a fun-loving attitude. He brings such joy to all our listeners.”
Wolf’s love of music and performing and the people he works with keep him going. While he enjoys attending CHS sporting events and concerts, he really can’t keep active in too many other ways.
“I can’t farm any longer. I can’t go to the lake fishing anymore. I can’t get my boat in the water. I can’t take vacations. It’s the only thing I have.”
Beginnings
Son of a cashier at the People’s State Bank in Cleveland, Wolf first picked up a musical instrument as a seventh grader. He chose the alto saxophone.
“I suppose it was because that is what my dad played down in Illinois in his younger days, but he played the barn-type music.”
Later, demonstrating his dedication to music at an early age, he bought up a tenor sax from local farmer Frank Ponwith. It had belonged to Ponwith’s niece Margie (Ponwith) Cooney, who was off to college to become a teacher. Wolf exchanged his final month of rigorous summer labor on the Ponwith farm for the instrument.
When Wolf was an upperclassman at CHS, band director Ed Istel—who jobbed on the trombone with the nationwide-famous Whoopee John Band—got Wolf interested in polka music. The genre struck a chord because it was nothing too deep, just fun dance music, Wolf said.
“Rock and roll didn’t exist back then. I liked that polka was happy and upbeat.”
Wolf’s musical career went up an octave when he was a high school senior. Sally Schoeb, who lived behind the gas station just up the street from the Wolf home, was taking accordion lessons at Brown’s Music store in New Ulm. One day, Wolf tagged along.
Wanting to play polka in the ballroom circuit, Wolf decided to take lessons at Brown’s too. His teacher was Guy DeLeo, who had taught at high schools around the area and had several bands but was also secretary of the musicians’ union.
“He taught me alternate fingering and to read music to see what I knew,” Wolf said.
After a few lessons with DeLeo, Wolf landed his first job. It was Easter Sunday at the Klossner ballroom with Don Frank and the Skinny Dutchmen. While Wolf liked polka, he had never practiced it before, not even with DeLeo. He went in without any rehearsal, but the pay was 12 bucks, and his music career was underway.
“I was nervous. The guys in the band were double my age or better.”
Bands and more bands
Wolf survived that first performance and went on to play with Frank’s band steadily for another two years before he hooked up with Norm Wilke & the Little Fishermen, a band from Le Sueur. A couple of years later he joined Ernie Coopman and the Jolly Brewers, a Mankato-based group.
After that, Wolf mostly worked as a “sideman.” He was hired to perform with a group of which he was not a regular band member.
“You put the music on the stand, and they called up the number and you sight read it,” he said.
While working his way through a business degree at Mankato State, Wolf was too busy on the weekends to play with any of the college bands. Arriving back home after 3:00 a.m. was common. There were no highways back then, so the band members had to weave their way through small towns around Southern Minnesota.
In 1959, Wolf took a job at the Le Sueur County Highway Department, but he never stopped playing. He got married on September 16, 1961, and from then to the end of the following October he had 17 performances.
“I called myself a band widow,” said wife Leanne Wolf.
Wolf’s father wanted him to “stop tooting his horn all over” and settle down, but the road kept calling. Besides live performances around Southern Minnesota and the Midwest as well, Wolf recorded music with Coopman, Cactus & the Jolly Brewers, the Lester Schuft & the Country Dutchmen, Gordy Prochaska & the Little Fisherman and Ivan Kahle.
He played on the KEYC-TVs “Bandwagon” when the show began in 1960. With the Ivan Kahle Band, he played on the Mall in Washington D.C for President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. He played around Europe with Erwin Suess’ band, the Hoolerie Dutchmen, when Suess organized a tourist trip there.
Wolf became known for playing hoolerie, a rollicking, improvised polka sound that consists of a concertina-clarinet combination played in high registers.
But he was never the star of the show, he said.
“I always sat down at the end. I just liked to play with a group that sound as good as they could with the talent they had. I got the bands used to using me and learned the song book and moved around where they needed somebody. That is how it all worked out, and we had the best time.”
Wolf retired from the Highway Department in 1993, but the ballroom scene started to decline by then, and polka music became less in demand. About 15 years ago, his vision hit a downbeat. Reading sheet music from a band’s playlist became difficult, and with a restricted license, he no longer could drive at night.
Wolf was forced to give up his role as a sideman.
“To bow out like that was hard to take,” he said. “When you are out of circulation, you fall by the wayside.”
Second wind
But Wolf managed to keep on performing. For the last 20 years, he has been playing tenor sax with Mary Guentzel Quintet, a local jazz/swing combo band he and Guentzel launched. For the music they chose, he first wrote out the scores in big notes and then memorized them. As members came on board, the group got better and better.
“I said to Mary, if we can make the music smooth and swing nice, the rest of the performers will hear that. And that’s what we did. We played with the same bunch and got the phrasing down where it sounded good, and it just worked out.”
In 2017, for his talent and dedication as a sideman for 62 years, Wolf was inducted into New Ulm’s Minnesota Music Hall of Fame. Memorabilia from his career is displayed alongside that of Prince, Bob Dylan, Judy Garland and some 160 other well-known Minnesota singers and musicians.
“I feel really privileged,” Wolf said. “It was an honor to be picked for the Hall of Fame because not many people I have played with have gotten in.”
Last October, he broke his hip, an injury that can be devastating for someone in his 80s, but the desire to return to performing got him through immobilization and the physical therapy that followed. His eyesight worsened, but the State Services for the Blind came to the rescue, enlarging his sheet music to 150 percent, so he can read it better.
On May 17, he finally got back on stage with a Guentzel five performance at the Indian Island Winery, near Janesville.
Currently Wolf performs about once a month with the Guentzel group. He hopes to up that to about three shows a month. He has no plans to stop playing but won’t look to join another band. He no longer drives but is grateful Leanne carts him from their home just south of Cleveland to performances or rehearsals and back.
“There’ve been some hard times, but all-in-all, I’ve had a lot of fun,” Wolf said. “I’ve never heard musicians complaining because they’ve played too much.”
Wolf and the rest of the Mary Guentzel Quintet will return to the stage on September 13 with a performance at the Indian Island Winery.
Wolf is the father-in-law of fifth-grade teacher Katie Wolf and the grandfather of sophomore Taylor Wolf, fourth grader Jasmine Wolf and first grader Jordan Wolf.
Video: Myron Wolf on the sax in “Crazy” by Patsy Cline.