About Us

Born in 1903 to Ludwig and Christiana (Schwahn) Welk, the sixth of eight children, Lawrence Welk was raised on a farm in a German-speaking town in North Dakota. He didn’t learn English until he was 21, which left him with the charming accent that marked his signature line: “Wunnerful, wunnerful!”  
The Lawrence Welk Show was a cheerful and wholesome variety show featuring music which Welk referred to as “champagne music,” comedy routines, bubbles, and a parade of smiling dancers, singers and musicians whom audiences worldwide knew and loved. Among the favorites were the Lennon Sisters; the Champagne Ladies (Alice Lon and Norma Zimmer); accordionist Myron Floren; Larry Hooper; singers Joe Feeney and Guy Hovis; violinist Aladdin; dancers Bobby Burgess and Barbara Boylan; and Welk’s daughter-in-law, Tanya Falan Welk.

The show was originally launched as a summer replacement in 1955 and remained on the air for 16 years. When the show was eventually taken off the air in 1971, Welk enlisted more than 200 independent stations to keep airing it, creating his own syndicated network.  
In 1964, Lawrence Welk went for a drive in north county San Diego, California planning to invest in a grove of orange trees. Instead, he bought a motel and a nine-hole golf course. When he staged a show there, it gained instant celebrity as a tourist hotspot for Lawrence Welk fans across the globe.

Lawrence Welk, and his son Lawrence Welk II (Larry Welk), had the vision to expand this ionic location into a true vacation haven. Eventually becoming the beautiful Welk Resorts San Diego which so many have come to cherish, it would grow to include a theatre, more golf and premier vacation homes. It was then that Larry and his dad knew this would be the start of something very, very special…  
Today, Lawrence Welk’s grandson Jon Fredricks, President and CEO of Welk Resorts, keeps the tradition of family hospitality alive. Welk Resorts operates five spectacular vacation ownership properties in San Diego, Palm Springs and Lake Tahoe in California, Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of Baja, Mexico, and in Branson, MO.

Each Welk property is carefully designed with the needs of our owners and guests in mind to provide unique, first-class accommodations and experiences.