Reporter Joel Waldinger from Wisconsin Life shares, “Accordion music has danced across our state for nearly 200 years. Brought from the old-world by European immigrants that polka sound is synonymous with Wisconsin. Helmi Strahl Harrington might love accordion music more than anyone. She founded the world’s largest accordion museum based in Superior, Wisconsin. Without modesty, Helmi makes that claim saying her museum has the most and the most unusual accordions anywhere in the world.
The accordion is an extraordinarily complex instrument that has been developed over two hundred years. Helmi has more than 2,500 examples in her museum called A World of Accordions Museum. She started a collection of unusual accordions not to be sold, but to be cherished. The oldest instrument dates back to around 1829 when it was first patented in Vienna, Austria.
The accordion could also be described as an instrument of war. It helped Helmi’s family rise from the ashes of WWII.
Helmi said, “If it weren’t for accordions, my mother wouldn’t have survived war, and that would include me.”
Helmi’s mother and grandmother had been evacuated from Cologne to Southern Germany, and that’s where Helmi was born. The family survived because her mother could entertain the troops at the Red Cross Station by playing the accordion.
The gift of accordion music was passed from mother to daughter and would be her mother’s gateway to America. Helmi’s mother saved three accordions, and she took them on board a ship when she came to the United States. However, an American soldier decided nobody needs three. So, he threw one of the accordions overboard. The other two accordions still exist in the museum.
Helmi was eight when she first began to study how to play the accordion and then how to repair them. She stuck her nose in her mother’s business right away and loved every moment of it. It was something that she loved and therefore Helmi loved it, too. Passed from mother to daughter the love of music survived war and endures on a stage in a former Baptist church that houses the museum.
Preserving accordions would prove to be a life’s work for Helmi. Now, in her golden years she sees change on the horizon. She is battling stage five cancer and makes no illusions about the future. Like her mother the accordion has helped Helmi through her darkest hours and her passion has never wavered. Helmi will tell you she started playing accordion because she loved it, and she still does.
The accordion reflects Helmi’s childhood in Germany, her history and a museum celebrated around the world.
Helmi said, “So much has happened in the last two hundred years, things have been lost, have been burned, have been killed by bombs, the history of the accordion, its construction and its music falls into that risk category. That is part of the passion because in the end, I am proud not just of the result, but of what it took to get there. The goal is to keep that going beyond me.”
