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Considered by many to be the most American part of America, the Midwest occupies a unique place in the national psyche, and its residents have been called the archetypal or quintessential Americans. The region is – and was – anything but homogenous, and any adequate treatment of it needs to take into account its many variations, complexities, and paradoxes. Any search for the essential character of the region soon founders on recognition of its cultural diversity. Yet, acknowledgment of the hazards of advancing broad generalizations about a region extending from Ohio to the Dakotas and ranging as far south as Missouri should not bar us from inquiring into the qualities and characteristics of its people. Despite the contradictions and complexities attaching to the region, the Midwest possesses a distinctive cultural identity, joining its constituent elements in an unstable and constantly changing, but nevertheless recognizable, pattern.

The buoyant Mr. Welk presided over \"The [Lawrence Welk] Show\" on ABC on Saturday evenings from 1955 to 1971, when the show was dropped because sponsors said its audience was too old, too rural and too sedate. Reinventing a Show Mr. Welk credited his success in part to his childhood poverty, observing in 1970 that \"there's something you learn by hardship, by a little fear\" and \"one of the real bad conditions we have today is that we don't allow children to work at an early age.\" He recounted his life and its lessons in several popular books written with Ms. [Bernice McGeehan], including \"Wunnerful, Wunnerful!\" (1971) and \"Ah-One, Ah-Two!\" (1974).

Today the matter comes up in the Senate, where the chief backer of the Strasburg grant, QUENTIN BURDICK , Democrat of North Dakota, indicated that he would not fight the House move which, his office insisted, seemed to deny funds specifically to the [LAWRENCE WELK] renovation project only. The 600 Strasburg residents will be rooting for that interpretation. Mr.

The appropriation was scorned outside the capital as the epitome of selfish pork barrel spending at a time when the poor, or even the military, were not being suitably taken care of. And though the appropriation is only $919 per member, it got little more respect in the Capitol. On the House floor, Representative Silvio Conte, Republican of Massachusetts, asked: \"What will they do for an encore? Earmark funds to renovate Guy Lombardo's speedboat? Or restore Artie Shaw's wedding tuxedo?\" North Dakota's entire House delegation, Representative Byron L. Dorgan, rose to protest. The Democratic lawmaker asked if the [Lawrence Welk] project's goal of developing tourism in a drought-ridden section of his state was much less worthy of Federal money than the Agricultural Hall of Fame in Bonner Springs, Kan. Then he proposed to rescind a few other recent appropriations: $590,000 for a vistor's center at Fort Larned National Historic site in Kansas; $125,000 for a study of Wilson Lake, Kansas; $150,000 for a feasibility study of a Pony Express visitors center in Marysville, Kansas, and $3,731,000 for the Throckmorton Plant Science Center at Kansas State University. And because an Ohio Republican, Representative John Kasich, had co-sponsored the [Jim Slattery] amendment, Mr. Dorgan proposed eliminating $516,000 appropriated to make a memorial of President William McKinley's Ohio home.

\"What will they do for an encore?\" said Representative Silvio O. Conte, the Massachusetts Republican who launched the first salvo. \"Earmark funds to renovate Guy Lombardo's speedboat? Or restore Artie Shaw's wedding tuxedo?\" \"I never know what's coming when the phone rings,\" said Sharon Eiseman, executive director of Welk Heritage Inc. \"You get to start feeling very defensive.\" Making Fun of [Lawrence Welk] \"You people in New York have a lot of famous people, but we've just got Lawrence,\" Rasmus Dirk, a retired carpenter, said plaintively. \"He's one of our boys.\"

Among the $14.1 billion for rural development projects is $500,000 for Strasburg, N.D., where Mr. [Lawrence Welk] was born in 1903. The Senate included the money to help revitalize the community, which has 700 people.

Mr. [Lawrence Welk], says Kathy Lennon, the host of the 90-minute program, is ''one of the unsung heroes of American television.'' One may question here if Mr. Welk is really ''unsung,'' but Miss Lennon's point is well taken. Mr. Welk, along with only a handful of other entertainers - Lucille Ball, Arthur Godfrey and Ed Sullivan, for example - defined the viewing habits of a generation. His special contribution, meanwhile, was that he outlasted virtually everyone else. What was the secret of his appeal? Miss Lennon says he was ''a constant in the constantly changing world,'' and that's probably part of the attraction. While American society seemed to transform itself in the 1960's and 1970's, Mr. Welk was like a rock. ''Ah one and ah two,'' he always began, and his huge audiences knew where they were. The champagne music and the members of Mr. Welk's television family identified a place.