The Hermans also provided dinner music when 3M brought the Lawrence Welk Show to the Twin Cities.
The orchestra played with recording stars appearing in town, including Pat Boone, Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. Over the next 35 years, Lois Herman played the organ and sang with the 11-piece orchestra, which drew 800 dancers on Sunday nights.
They moved to Mendota Heights in the early 1950s after Jules was hired to lead the house band at the Prom Ballroom on University Avenue. Lois retired from music for most of the 1940s, raising four children, before joining her husband’s band. The Hermans decided to stay behind and forge their own musical identities. Lois Herman sang with Welk’s orchestra until the entourage moved to California in 1940. “She was so proud of it, especially as she got older,” said Bonnie Herman, a singer herself who has recorded with the Singers Unlimited. A contest to decide the name of Welk’s new theme song, “Bubbles in the Wine,” led to her winning the title of “Champagne Lady” and made her a star. Within a year of joining the Welk show in the late 1930s, she married Jules, the chaperone Welk had assigned to her. The singer was Lois Best, a Pennsylvania native who had been performing on radio station KDKA. Lawrence hired her right on the spot,” Bonnie Herman said. Welk asked Jules to go with him to listen to an 18-year-old singer and piano player, “and they were both very impressed. They met when the Welk orchestra was performing in Pittsburgh. Now they share a gravestone that says, “Music was our life.” She was inducted into the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame, as was her late husband, Jules, whom she met when he played trumpet in Welk’s band. Her cheery voice and engaging stage presence turned heads and launched a 60-year musical career that included once playing the organ for President Ronald Reagan. Lois Herman, of Mendota Heights, Welk’s “Original Champagne Lady” and later the featured singer in a 35-year run at the Prom Ballroom in St. “They always said, ‘Oh, Lois, what a sweet lady.’ They all said that about her.” “She wasn’t putting on any airs, she was charming, quietly confident within herself. That was my mom,” said her daughter, Bonnie Herman, of Chicago. “You see her natural personality on the video. There’s a 1939 film clip that shows Lois Best Herman singing and smiling next to a very young Lawrence Welk as his orchestra plays on.
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