Harold Loeffelmacher
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Harold Loeffelmacher (March 14, 1905 – January 30, 1987) was an American musician and bandleader.
Loeffelmacher is best known for forming the polka band known as the Six Fat Dutchmen. His band was a hard-working group of traveling musicians, playing as many as 335 dates per year, mostly in the Midwestern United States. He and his band were based in New Ulm, Minnesota, often called the "Polka Capital of the Nation". Over a span of 14 years the Six Fat Dutchmen recorded 800 polkas, waltzes and schottisches on the RCA Victor label, and for ten years they were signed by Dot Records. Loffelmacher was inducted into the International Polka Association's Hall of Fame in 1975. [1]
Loeffelmacher was born in 1905 on a Minnesota farm near Fort Ridgely. After his family moved to New Ulm, he began taking violin lessons, and moved to wind instruments when he bought a horn by mail order.
In 1932, he started a band that went under various names, until he settled on the name "Six Fat Dutchmen." As might be surmised from that name there were initially six members, but over time it grew to include about a dozen musicians. Their popularity grew to the point where they played the Nebraska State Fair for 26 straight years.
During Loeffelmacher's long career of touring from show to show, it is claimed that he eventually wore out seven buses while accumulating as much as 90,000 miles of road travel annually. In winter while the other band members would break from their hectic schedules and take well-deserved vacations, Loeffelmacher would often continue to perform solo on the bass horn, his favorite instrument. He performed a dozen times on the long-running nationally-televised TV series, The Lawrence Welk Show.
Loeffelmacher and his wife Geneva had a son, who bore them two grandchildren. By the time he was inducted in 1975 into the International Polka Music Hall of Fame at 70 years of age, he had retired from active performing, and was raising fruit in New Ulm. Not content with having seen a good portion of rural America from the windows of tour buses, he was said to have visited about three dozen countries in his lifetime, before dying in 1987 at the age of 82.
In 1990, three years after his death, Harold Loeffelmacher and his Six Fat Dutchmen were inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame. [2]
As recently as 2006, 74 years after the band's founding, a compilation CD of the Six Fat Dutchmen's original recordings was produced and marketed, another testament to Loeffelmacher's contribution to polka music.
