Polka Mania -- Yankee Magazine article
an accordion player, with a turntable and 6,000 watts, is on a mission.
DURHAM NEW HAMPSHIRE. In a cramped studio deep within the Memorial Union Building at the University of New Hampshire, amid rack lights, an Allen Ginsberg poster, and stickers for The Brainbats and Nudeswirl, Gary Sredzienski is having a polka party.
Which is what he's been doing nearly every Saturday morning from 9 to 11 a.m. since 1987, when this radio evangelist of ethnic music proposed a new program to WUNH FM. The signal stretches north to Portland and south nearly to Boston, not a megastation's reach but one that hits a nerve. Almost one-third of the station's pledge-drive revenue comes from "Polka Party" listeners, and Sredzienski gets a fan letter a day. In 1999 he was named a celebrity in a statewide poll -- second only to the comedian Adam Sandler.
"This was a cultural wasteland of homogenous commercial radio," he says. "I took a piece of the Connecticut I grew up in, and the program snowballed."
Most disc jockeys of the genre lived through the music's golden age a half-century ago, when this hybrid of "old country/new country" was the sound track to the social lives of Polish immigrants. Sredzienski didn't because he's only 39 years old.
He's an anomaly: a full-time accordionist with a forestry degree, who left the field 11 years ago to start his own "ethno-rock" band (The Serfs), with four compact discs on his own Bellows Music label and a gig at the Simthsonian on his resume.
When he arrived in 1980 as a freshman at the University of New Hampshire, this corner of New England, he says, lacked the "ethnic thing." It was a long way from his Polish-enclave hometown of Enfield Connecticut, where his family owned one of the many tobacco farms that once employed legions of newly arrived Poles, including Sredzienski's own grandparents. Five local polka shows ruled his family's radio dial, his father's harmonica filled the house, and frequent house parties bonded the community. There he took in the folk tunes offered up by the older generation and picked up the accordion at age eight because he thought the entire world loved it.
"Down my way, there was ethnic radio, polka dances, bakeries, delis," he says. "The area seemed bland." New Hampshire had its Polish communities -- in Newmarket, Claremont, Franklin, and elsewhere -- but Sredzienski says they had lost their Polishness.
"Nothing cultural was really happening," he says. "There used to be a polka show 30 years ago in this area. There was also an accordion studio in Kittery. My show is a revival. One sweet old lady in Newmarket told me, 'We were once ashamed to admit that we were Polish, but now I'm not!' They were craving it around here!"
And not just the Poles. Sredzienski has received mail from kids who tape the show for relatives, and those who want accordion lessons; from the kitchen crew at Stillings Dining Hall at UNH and the Exeter Inn; cooks out on the Isles of Shoals; antiques-shop employees; "Greek ladies in Dover and Rollinsford"; a guy in Danvers, Massachusetts," with special antennas on his house to pull in the show; "a little girl who sits in front of the radio thinking I'm inside; several cheeseball and cool lawyers"; a Honey Bee Donuts crew; a dog-toy dealer; a Seabrook biker gang; military folks, hippies; ex-hippies; punkers; and Internet listeners from around the country.
It takes a full Friday for Sredzienski to cook up the two-hour borscht of music, culture, and dedications that is his Saturday-morning program. At home, he shuffles 3,000 LPs (2,993 of them donated), plus clippings and Web printouts, writing a script longhand on loose-leaf. His monologues can move from topics like the discovery of King Tut's tomb to Polish ale to a dedication marking the birthday of Godzilla. For a seven-year-old harmonica lover, Sredzienski spins the Harmonica Rascals, then gives a history of the instrument. Next he hefts his beloved red Polverini Brothers accordion and plays, out over the airways, "Under a Clear Blue Sky."
"I'd be bored silly if I just came in here and spun polkas," he says before making a musical salute to an upcoming Hungarian holiday. "Anybody could do that. What I'm doing is preserving old-time radio as well as ethnic diversity. You gotta keep up the culture." -- Suzanne Strempek Shea, for Yankee Magazine, July/August, 2001
