Know Your Accordions - How button boxes squeezed their way into Frank Spetich's heart.
Frankie Spetich could have chosen the Americanized piano accordion as his instrument,
but instead he went for its gypsy cousin, the button box. Those who can't distinguish
between the two instruments probably never lived in a remote mountain town in Europe,
nor did they have a crazy Uncle Slavko who liked to slide around on cow pies when
he got drunk. The piano accordion is sleek, shiny, and black and white. Usually,
its only embellishment is its owner's name, spelled in press-on rhinestones running
down the side. It's the kind of accordion Lawrence Welk played as bubbles fell from
the studio sky.
The button box has more of a homespun allure. Known to its detractors as the "honky
box" or "cheesebox," its hand-painted folds might be decorated with patterned edelweiss
or a pastoral scene of a grass-chewing goat. Its trim is usually adorned with mother-of-pearl
inlay and etched brass. Rather than sounding smooth and champagney, like an American
accordion, it sounds musty and twangy, with a yearning quality that its prim, tuxedoed
relative can't match. While piano accordions are made in factories, button boxes
are more often fashioned by a solitary, gnarled craftsman. His backyard workshop
is usually located in a beautiful yet impoverished town, whose forte is being at
the wrong place at the wrong time during a Balkan conflict. Spetich, a bandleader
and composer who's known as the "Polka King of Barberton, Ohio," owns four button
boxes. One of them, a Melodia, came from a shop in Menges, Slovenia. "I've been there
six, seven times. I get such a reception over there. I feel like I'm somebody. When
I walk in, I'll start to tell this little guy, Franz, what to fix. He says, 'You
don't need to tell me. Just gimme the button box.' Pretty soon, he'll bring it to
me with a big smile on his face, and I'll start playing. Next thing, I turn around
and the whole shop's down there listening."
Spetich's Novak button box was made in Klagenfurt, Austria, where mass production
is a dirty word. "There's four generations of the Novak family that make those."
Their output is only about five button boxes a year, "because if you make more, you
have to give so much money to the government. Five or under, you can sell them and
keep all the money." Spetich's family hails from Cepno, Slovenia, where the local
button box player was called a domache godec, or "hometown musician." Before immigrating
to Barberton, his father was a domache godec in training. "Button box players in
them days were very precious people, because that's the only kind of entertainment
they had," says Spetich, who's 76. "You had a town where nobody played, you never
got any music." The only accolade his dad got was a good swift kick, though: "He
saved his money and bought this button box. His boss heard him play it in the hayloft
and said, 'If you've got that much energy, we'll give you more work." Though Spetich
is retired, he has about 50 button box students at his store, called Magic City Music
after Barberton's nickname. The manufacturing town earned the moniker in the early
1900s, when its population exploded. Now, residents joke that it's called the Magic
City because everyone disappeared. In the 1980s, when the rubber industry tanked,
people couldn't leave fast enough. Last year, Spetich won a Lifetime Achievement
Award from Cleveland's Polka Hall of Fame. As he walked down the aisle to receive
his crystal trophy, the Hall of Fame All-Stars played his "Pony-Tail Polka." "I got
emotional," he says. "Some of the fellas that really opened doors for me were there."
In his acceptance speech, he paid homage to bigger-city polka kings, people like
Frankie Yankovic, Lou Trebar, and Johnny Pecon. Those guys had their own polka TV
shows in the 1950s, when there was a polka TV show on every Cleveland channel. Skilled
in many instruments, Spetich avoided the button box in his youth because of its Alpine
hillbilly connotations. But eventually, he took it up because he couldn't find anybody
else to play it in his band. All the halfway decent button box players were already
busy. Once he mastered the rudimentary "hee-haw" style, Spetich could rip through
a mean "Blue Skirt Waltz." But it wasn't until he was upstaged by a Slovenian bus
driver who could eat a piece of chocolate cake and play at the same time that he
unlocked the true secrets of the button box. The guy knew notes in the outer limits
of the instrument that Spetich had never dreamed of. "That's when my ulcers flared
up." He sold all his button boxes, vowing never to pick one up again. Eventually,
though, he clandestinely messed around on a loaner and couldn't put it down. Spetich
again swore off the button box in 1977, after a heartbreaking divorce. He might have
faded into obscurity in this town of mom-and-pop fried chicken joints, had he not
struck up a relationship with Betty, the widow next door. They bonded over a kind
gesture - she offered to pick up his mail for him while he went on tour. Two years
later, they were sharing the same mailbox. He proposed on a Thursday. They got married
the following Tuesday, because he had gigs booked later in the week. A gracious,
upbeat woman, Betty not only rescued all of Frankie's polka memorabilia from the
trash, she got him back in the studio. "He just needed some tender loving care,"
she says. "And he needed someone to let him know that he really had a lot to offer
the polka world." Since the wedding four years ago, he's released eight CDs and is
working on a ninth, Frankie Spetich Live At The Beer Garden. He also formed a band
composed of his students, the Magic City Button Boxers. Its revolving lineup includes
about 10 men and 1 woman, Mary Sakich, who's 85. Sakich is the only band member who
gets to play sitting down. Her 65-year-old live-in boyfriend is usually in the audience
cheerleading. Spetich is never sure who's gonna show up for a gig. "We don't wear
tuxes anymore. I just have 'em all wear black pants. I bring the shirts. I pass the
shirts out, and we just shake hands and play." But unlike the Slovenian bus driver,
they don't do both at the same time.
