Post by kaima on May 1, 2015 7:56:03 GMT -7
A Reason to Hop, Kick and Swoon
April 30, 2015 - 7:10 PM
Anchorage’s Prize Honker Turns 80
Photo by Teeka Ballas
“There are two curses to manhood: shaving and a steady job,” says Dan Zantak with a warm, slightly raspy laugh. Clean-shaven and clad in jeans and a blazer Zantak sips an IPA on a Sunday afternoon at Chilkoot Charlie’s; the octogenarian looks more like a mafia boss than a squeezebox honker.
Nominated this year to the World Concertina Hall of Fame, Dan Zantak—known to just about everyone in Anchorage and beyond as Polka Dan—has amassed more stories of adventure, success and joy than years he’s lived. Although it was a series of pseudo steady jobs he refers to as “traps,” that allowed him to initially make his way all over the world, it was the love of travel that lured him in, and he figured out early on that polka music was his ticket.
His bread and butter has been the accordion, a free reed musical instrument like the harmonica. There are two main types—the button and the piano. The concertina is different from most accordions, in that the average accordion’s buttons are chords, and the concertina’s buttons are individual notes, so a number of buttons must be pushed to create a chord. There are probably more than 100 different types of squeezeboxes, from small to enormous and heavy, round and square. Polka Dan primarily plays a Chemnitzer, a German concertina. It is large and rectangular and has buttons on both sides.
Unraveling Dan’s story is like trying to grasp in one sitting all the types of squeezeboxes and their different functions. Sitting with Dan means engaging in a series of non-sequiturs and jumping off the chronological timeline. It’s sometimes difficult to know if he’s finished answering a question or taken a detour. If anything, 80 years courteously affords one that luxury.
There’s an excitement that comes with hanging out with Dan—his stories are a little bit spy, a little bit espionage, and a whole lot of world traveling hipster-with-a-squeezebox fun. His story is a dense book, so in one conversation it’s not easy to discern how he came to be in each sketchy situation he reminisces, or how he got to play some of the great venues he has or how he summoned such intriguing audiences. Sometimes he was just going from one place to another; he’d work as an engineer, work trade deals, he’d scheme and find ways to keep himself moving.
Born in Minnesota to Polish immigrants, he first fell in love with his brother’s concertina when he was just a child.
“I can almost pinpoint it. It was 1942, I was about seven years old, and my brother Louie was home on leave from the army. When he left, he said, ‘Don't touch that thing!’ but as soon as he was gone, I started squeezing; 1942, I remember that well.”
When Polka Dan reminisces his eyes twinkle and bend, lines form at the corners.
Dan’s infatuation with travel might be traced back to his “Nordeaster” Minneapolis childhood, growing up in a bilingual household with stories of the old country. Or it could be attributed to his college days when he went away to university in Wisconsin and learned that not only was there a world outside the warehouse district where he’d been raised, but it was a world with strikingly different features.
“It was the first time I ever saw a sunrise other than a sunrise over the grain elevator and a sunset other than a sunset over the pickle factory. And that was amazing for me. I thought I was in paradise.”
Dan says he didn’t go to college to get a degree, he went to play football, because that’s “what you do when you’re a big Polack. But of course, the closest I got to being an athlete was athlete’s foot.”
