From the Luiseño village of Moosa and the 1947 highway to the first color episode of The Lawrence Welk Show, Champagne Village and the Welk today. All records sourced and cited.
On September 18, 1965, the most watched bandleader in America broadcast his show in color for the first time, and he did it from a mobile home park on Highway 395, seven miles north of Escondido.
The episode was called "Fun Day at Escondido." There was golf. There was a picnic. There were sack races and a square dance, and the Lennon Sisters. Lawrence Welk stood in front of the camera and introduced his audience to the man who ran the park for him, Bert Carter, the Dodge executive who had given Welk his first national television sponsorship.
Welk had owned the place for about a year. He had found it by accident, on his way to a health spa, and when the owner's wife was told who wanted to buy it, she thought it was an April Fool's joke.
The hills along the old highway north of Escondido were Luiseño land long before they were anyone's ranch. A San Diego County environmental report in 2014 described an archaeological site at the confluence of Moosa Canyon and its south fork, near Gopher Canyon, that "has been suggested as the Luiseño village of Moosa." A 1984 site record notes that part of it was cut through by the construction of Highway 395.
The names on the map came from the homesteaders who followed. According to a history compiled by the Twin Oaks Valley Community Sponsor Group, Major Gustavus French Merriam homesteaded in nearby Twin Oaks Valley in 1875, and a state survey crew in 1898 named the mountains running north from Escondido after him. Deer Springs was once called Uhland Canyon, after Jacob Uhland, who homesteaded there in 1885.
The road came later. US 395 originally looped west from Escondido through San Marcos, Vista, Bonsall and Fallbrook. In 1947 a new, direct route opened north from Escondido through the canyon country. Part of that 1947 road is the stretch locals now call Champagne Boulevard.
By the early 1960s, seven miles north of Escondido on that road, there was a small mobile home park with seventy nine spaces and a nine hole golf course. It was called Esquire Oaks.
The story of how Welk found it comes from a resident's article in Trail-R-News Magazine in 1965, which the park's homeowners association still keeps in its files.
Welk and Bert Carter were driving north on 395. They were on their way to the Golden Door, the health resort that Deborah Szekely had opened in 1958 a mile farther up the road. They passed the park, turned around and went back to look.
Welk began looking into the purchase on April 1. When the owner's wife was told that Lawrence Welk wanted to buy the park, she laughed. She had, she said, had April Fool's jokes played on her before.
It was not a joke. Welk bought it in 1964. The San Diego Union-Tribune later described the purchase as a golf course, a motel and a mobile home community in rural Escondido. He renamed it Lawrence Welk's Country Club Mobile Home Estates.
What he paid for it, we could not find. No source we checked gives a price.
It is hard to overstate how famous Lawrence Welk was in 1964.
He was born on March 11, 1903 in Strasburg, North Dakota, to a German speaking farm family. He led dance bands through the 1920s and 1930s, and his sound got its name when a dancer in Pittsburgh described the music as light and bubbly as champagne. It became Champagne Music, and Welk became the Champagne Music Maker.
His show started locally on KTLA in Los Angeles in 1951. ABC picked it up in 1955 and carried it until 1971, and then Welk syndicated it himself until 1982. The Los Angeles Times called it the longest running prime time musical program in television history. In 1964 it was on every Saturday night, and a huge share of the country watched it.
He was also, by every account, a careful businessman. And a man who did not drink.
Welk did not just own the park. He spent time there.
He kept a 1,400 square foot mobile home on a lot beside the golf course, with his own steps down to the green. The Trail-R-News piece describes him at potluck dinners in a chef's hat, auctioning boxes at a box social, and playing in an annual golf tournament between his "Musical Family" from the show and the park's residents.
The 1965 article says the nine holes were being expanded to eighteen and the park from 104 spaces to about two hundred, on "some 400 acres." By about 1970 it had both.
It also had a TV episode that the audience did not forget. According to Kathy Lennon, quoted in Welk's Los Angeles Times obituary, the Lennon Sisters taped a pool scene at the resort in modest one piece swimsuits. Viewers wrote in to complain that their legs were showing. Welk told the wardrobe department never to put the sisters in bathing suits again.
In 1974 the San Diego Reader sent a writer, Glenn Grant, up the highway. His cover story ran under the headline "Lawrence Welk will probably kill me for this, but I found paradise eight miles north of Escondido." He counted 205 mobile homes and about four hundred residents, all retirees, every one personally screened by Bert Carter. There had been no vacancy in five years. The waiting list, Carter said, was about five thousand. They had "not spent five cents for advertising." The restaurant was called the Welkome Inn.
In 1979 Welk put about $12 million into the place. According to a company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, the expansion took it to 452 units and added shops, a museum of Welk memorabilia and a three hundred seat dinner theater. It was renamed the Lawrence Welk Country Club Village.
The theater drew real stars. In August 1981, Dorothy Lamour played the lead in Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park" at the Lawrence Welk Theater, just north of Escondido. A Los Angeles Herald Examiner photograph of her in the role is in the Los Angeles Public Library.
The road out front got a new name too. The Valley Center History Museum connects the name Champagne Boulevard to the line every Welk viewer knew: "The champagne music of Lawrence Welk."
Inside the village, Welk's fame was on display. There was a life size bronze statue of him, a fountain shaped like a quarter note, and a champagne glass described as the world's largest, given to him for his twenty fifth anniversary on television.
In the mid 1980s the business changed shape. Welk's company opened its first vacation ownership resort at the property, a timeshare development called the Lawrence Welk Resort Villas. Marriott Vacations Worldwide dates it to 1984. Welk's own company dated it to 1985. A second golf course, another theater and more shops followed.
In 1986, the mobile home park, by then 459 spaces, was converted to resident ownership and became Champagne Village. Today the homeowners association describes it as a guard gated, fifty five and over, resident owned manufactured home community of 457 homes, where the owners hold title to their land.
That is the real estate detail worth knowing. In most manufactured home parks, residents own the house and rent the dirt. At Champagne Village, they own both.
Lawrence Welk died on May 17, 1992 of pneumonia, at his home in Santa Monica. He was eighty nine. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted that he and his wife "frequently lived at their second home in Bonsall near Escondido," and that his company held hundreds of acres of residential investment property north of Escondido.
The family kept running the business for nearly thirty more years. His son Larry chaired the board. His grandson Jon Fredricks became chief executive in 1999. In 2001 the company spent $33 million over four years adding two hundred timeshare condominiums.
In June 2020, the San Diego County District Attorney announced a settlement with Welk Resorts of up to $5.5 million. The DA alleged that buyers of the company's "Platinum Program" timeshares between 2011 and 2016 had been told, falsely, that they were buying real estate that would go up in value. The company admitted no wrongdoing.
In January 2021, Welk Resorts agreed to sell to Marriott Vacations Worldwide. The deal closed on April 1, 2021. April Fool's Day, again. Marriott Vacations valued it at $485 million at closing. Since 2023 the resort has been called the Hyatt Vacation Club at The Welk, with two golf courses, eight pools and the Theatre at The Welk.
The Welk is not in Fallbrook. It sits about eight miles north of downtown Escondido, east of Interstate 15 along Champagne Boulevard, in unincorporated San Diego County with an Escondido mailing address and the 92026 ZIP code. Fallbrook is about a dozen miles farther north and west. Locals just call it the Welk.
Around it is Hidden Meadows, a community of about 4,500 people on the hills east of the freeway. Across the freeway are the Merriam Mountains, named for the 1875 homesteader.
The founding story comes from the 1965 Trail-R-News Magazine article "How It All Started," reprinted by the Champagne Village homeowners association. The first color broadcast is documented in the CTVA episode guide to the show's eleventh season. The 1974 village comes from Glenn Grant's cover story in the San Diego Reader. Welk's life and the Lennon Sisters story come from Tom Gorman's obituary in the Los Angeles Times (1992). The company timeline comes from the International Directory of Company Histories and the San Diego Union-Tribune. The settlement comes from the San Diego County District Attorney as reported by Times of San Diego, and the sale from Marriott Vacations Worldwide's closing release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lawrence Welk built his fame on Champagne Music. The road in front of his village is Champagne Boulevard. The park his residents bought became Champagne Village.
And in 1974, the Reader reported, you could not drink in it. Alcohol was banned in the clubhouse, at the pool, on the fairways and at every social function, because, as the reporter was told, "Lawrence Welk is a teetotaler."
One more. The day Welk found the park, he was driving up 395 to the Golden Door. In 2020, voters rejected a plan for 2,135 homes on the Merriam Mountains across the freeway from the Welk. In 2022, the Escondido Times-Advocate reported, the Golden Door bought that land, about 1,900 acres, and plans to keep it open.
The spa he was headed to that afternoon in 1964 ended up buying the mountain he would have looked at from his front porch.
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