re: Lawrence Welk's house, well I personally feel that some funding should be put aside for historical preservation. So many buildings which would appeal based on their history have disappeared, often from disuse and neglect. Now that nostalgia is fashionable again, people will travel a long distance just to look at a SIGN saying such and such happened here...
If communities spent money to preserve their cultural and historical heritage, that could help their tourism industry and bring revenue into the community; in other words such efforts woudl pay for themselves.I know not everyone wants a tourism industry where they live but there are many communities that depend upon this; Nova Scotia would be very poor indeed (no more mining or fishing there) if they had not wised up and realized they'd make a killing in tourism; now it's a hot spot and there are great music festivals, golf outings etc.

of course, I come from Elmira which tore down all sorts of buildings Mark Twain was associated with...as well as beautiful old movie theatres with Art Deco designs. No reason for tourists to want to go there now...lack of forethought on the part of the politicians making the decisions. Cities and towns still fortunate to have their old "bijou" theatres have turned them into showplaces and gotten them on the register of historic laces, thus assuring some funding for their renovation...

I see this as a "big picture" issue that goes beyond keeping one musician's boyhood house standing...if we keep letting these old buildings be torn down (and let greedy developers put up yet another CVS or Gap store), we annihilate our history and culture...and I personally would be happy to have some of my tax dollars go towards such preservation, much more than the billions of dollars worth of bombs recently used in the pointless war in Iraq...or for that matter, the billions being spent on the Big Dig for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam underground...