Sixty years ago John Sheetz was doing some business in Milwaukee and wandered into the Red Room of the Plankington Hotel, where a pianist calling himself Walter Busterkeys was tickling the ivories. “My father talked to him,” recalls John’s son Jack, now 80. “Walter had a two-week engagement at the Red Room. My father asked if he’d like to come to La Crosse. Walter said, ‘Well, I’ll have to talk to my mother.’ He was kind of a mama’s boy. She had to size up my father, to see if this place was good enough for Walter. She liked my dad. So Liberace started here at $80 a week.”
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Born in West Allis, Wisconsin, Wladziu Valentino Liberace had been a child prodigy, but as a teenager in the mid-1930s he began playing Milwaukee roadhouses and hotel lounges. He performed at the Cavalier for a month, playing a black baby grand on a small stage that overlooked the lounge area. He worked six nights a week, starting with the cocktail hour at four and playing until one in the morning. According to Jack, his repertoire was mostly classical music, with an occasional hit song. But at the Cavalier he began developing the act that would eventually make him a star.
Liberace only played the Cavalier once more, in 1941, but he never forgot John Sheetz. “In the 1960s he played twice at the auditorium here,” says Jack. “And both times he came to the Cavalier and spent some time with us. One time my dad was at a Liberace concert at the Superdome in New Orleans. There were thousands of people there. Dad sent word to the stage that he was in the audience. Before Liberace started his show, he said, ‘I have to make this appearance exceptionally good, because my old boss is in the audience.’ And he asked my father to stand up.”
–Dave Hoekstra
