Accordion

Oscar Florentino Tellez, 56, one of San Antonio's best known bajo sexto players who was a regular with the Grammy-winning Texas Tornados, died Sunday in a one-vehicle traffic accident near Cotulla, Texas. Mr. Tellez taught himself to play music as a small boy. By his teens, he had learned to play the bass, drums, accordion, the keyboard and the bajo sexto, a Mexican bass guitar that resembles a 12-string guitar.

HADDON TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- In the glory days, Stanley Darrow recalled with a wistful sigh, they were as popular as shoe stores. "Back in the '50s and '60s," he said, strapping on a 21-pound, gleaming, black Titano and giving it a squeeze, "every town had an accordion school." Now, Darrow's Acme Accordion School is among the last of its kind. Founded in 1952 and last remodeled in 1960, the low, white building is a throwback to a time when Lawrence Welk and his champagne bubbles were floating at the top of their popularity.

THE ELTON JOHN of Castle Street remembers his Polish grandmother saving nickels to buy him $4.50 accordion lessons when he was in grade school. The kid was a natural, so good that Uncle Joe would tie the boy and his squeeze box to a kitchen chair to keep the music going. Thirty years later, the polka prodigy plays a half-dozen instruments, writes music the way other people jot down a grocery list, and is looking for the Bernie Taupin of Baltimore to put words to his music. All while working the counter at the A&A Candy & Tobacco Co. on South Broadway to support his young family and make ends meet.

He noted that first came the dateof her birthand spoke of the following datewith tears,but he said what mattered most ofallwas the dash between those years.THAT IS AN EXCERPT from a poem, "The Dash," read two months ago at the Maryland Senior Citizens Hall of Fame awards luncheon. Linthicum resident Adeline Bradshaw and 49 others from across the state were honored at the affair for making "an outstanding contribution to the lives of others in the community."The lines refer to the dates on a tombstone, the beginning and the end, the dash to the time between, and the poem by Linda Evans to how that time is used.

What do you say after 55 years? Hi? What's up? Did you bring your accordion?"What I did was give him a big hug, and I said, `Thank God!' " says Larry Micucci."

I LIKE THE blues. I like straight-ahead jazz. I like anything Latin. I like rock, I like roll. I like Mozart and Mahler. I like Verdi and Donizetti. I like Porter and Arlen and Brel. I like Cherry Poppin' Daddies. I can even listen to 10 minutes of bluegrass music once a year. But, most of all, I'm a sucker for "La Vie en Rose" played on the violin and backed by accordion and mandolin.It's old, lovely romance music, the soundtrack from some black-and-white film set in a Parisian bistro. It's not a sound you hear around here every day.But, we got a dose of it the other night in Hampden.

AS REGULAR readers of this space know, I have spent the better part of my life avoiding accordion music.This is because the accordion is the most annoying instrument known to man, something that dawned on me at the age of 2 or 3 (and I was not particularly precocious).The fact is, there are only about 20 people in this country who actually enjoy the accordion. And these are mostly societal misfits, people who were dropped on their heads as infants, etc.For the rest of us, the sight of someone strapping on an accordion is the most terrifying sight imaginable.

As the sounds of Christmas carols escaped from Isabella P. Kilmer's two-octave accordion and echoed through the halls of St. Paul's School for Girls, it was a signal that Christmas break was about to begin.Affectionately called Izzy by faculty and students, Mrs. Kilmer, a soft-spoken, diminutive woman with carefully coiffed snow-white hair who favored conservative dresses, died Friday in her sleep at the Pickersgill Retirement Community in Towson. She was 100.It was her traditional Christmas trooping followed by a procession of students and teachers at the Brooklandville school for girls that was as much an anticipated event at the school as the annual arrival of St. Nicholas himself.

So how does an accordion-playing boy from Baltimore end up a career keyboardist with legendary sun-and-fun band the Beach Boys?Practice, practice. And a deep appreciation for all kinds of music, from Beethoven to Chick Corea to the Beatles.Baltimore native Mike Meros, 46, was introduced to the Beach Boys when he was a teen-ager. "I remember turning on the radio, and the DJ said, 'The next group is better than the Beatles.' And then I heard 'Good Vibrations' for the first time. And I thought, 'He could be right.

THE AIR conditioning "wrassling" season has two times of peak activity. The first is the spring, when the well-prepared guys haul their air conditioners out of storage, plunk them in windows, and make sure they work.The other is now, in the middle of the summer, when guys who have been promising folks for weeks that they will put that air conditioner in can no longer put the dirty job off.While I like to think of myself as a well-prepared kind of guy, recently I found myself hanging out a bedroom window, wrestling with an air conditioner, sweating like a procrastinator.