MONROE - Outside, the gray dusk of the mid-December Sunday afternoon settled in with a chill. Inside Turner Hall, couples with flush faces skipped and glided across the dance floor under the warm glow of Christmas lights. The Packers were playing the Bears, but that wasn't keeping people away. The place was packed.

From the stage, Greg Anderson pumped his accordion and instructed the dancers for a circle two-step.

"Ladies, go ahead to the second gentleman," he called out. "Now two-step. Dance with the lady in front of you."

That day, Dec. 16, was a bittersweet afternoon for the Greg Anderson Band and his self-described "faithful followers." Anderson is retiring after 40 years of leading one of the region's most popular variety dance bands. That afternoon was his last gig leading Turner Hall's traditional Sunday dances. Many there have danced to his music since he was a teenager in the 1960s.

This Monday, Anderson plays his last public dance as part of a New Year's celebration at Turner Hall. He'll be bringing past members up onstage to join him and the current line-up of John Remy and Jim Feuling.

Donna Ditzenberger will be there. A longtime friend of his late mother, she's been dancing at Anderson's gigs for more than 40 years. "He plays excellent polkas, waltzes, foxtrots," she said.

She's not biased, she added.

"It's just fact. He has represented Monroe, Wisconsin, in so many towns. He is one of the best ambassadors Monroe has ever had."

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Anderson, who grew up in South Wayne, is the grandson of Norwegian immigrants. His grandfather, Narv Narveson, changed his name to Andrew Anderson when he entered the country at Ellis Island because the customs workers felt there were already too many Narvesons coming through.

His father, Bob, grew up during the Great Depression in a family of 13 kids.

Taking up the "stomach Steinway," as Anderson jokingly calls the accordion, was one of his father's dreams as a child. But without a lot of money to go around in his family, his father never did.

"I was kind of an extension of what he would've wanted to do," Anderson said. He started taking lessons at age 5 from Carol Nipple, a student of the polka great Rudy Burkhalter. Anderson's parents lavished him with sheet music. It paid off. Nowadays, he has a repertoire of about 750 songs he can play from heart.

Learning the accordion was popular for kids back then. Anderson remembers playing with 50-plus other accordion students in Turner Hall as a young child.

"It kind of sounded like 50 cats in a barrel if they weren't playing together," he said. When he was 8, he got hired for $5 to play tunes at the Saalsaa farm for a "twilight meeting" - an informal get-together for farmers to discuss plant genetics and breeding sires. "That was my first professional job."

By the time he was 13, his accordion teacher told him she couldn't teach him anything more. At 14, he got his first job performing for a dance during a barn raising at the Dickau farm. He played every song he could remember that night, three and a half times through to fill time. Soon Anderson's parents were driving him to gigs at Joe's Cafe in Evansville, Coach-N-Four in Hazel Green and other bars around the area.

Realizing he was on the path to being a lifelong professional musician didn't crystallize until a brutal accident in 1974, when he was 19. He was driving a tractor near his parents' dairy farm when a car hit him head-on. He flew over the car's hood and "ten tons of International" tractor landed on him.

The accident happened on a Saturday afternoon. He had a gig that night at a bar in Monticello called The Casino. As he still lay twisted on the ground, he told his dad, "You better call The Casino. I'm going to be late."

"I had visions of them propping me up in a chair after they put a cast on me," he remembers now. Instead, he spent more than two months in the hospital. Eventually, doctors had to amputate half his leg.

It changed how he viewed his music career.

"I put the band out there as the one thing I could still do yet," he said.

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Ever since, he and the various incarnations of his band have played at dance halls and bars all over the region. In the late 1970s, he and a group of fans traveled together for a tour across Germany, Switzerland and Austria and Luxembourg. His mother and her friends went along, but his dad stayed home.

"Above all else, my dad was a conscientious farmer," he said, and didn't have time "for 10 days of jocularity."

Through the decades, Anderson has stayed close to his family and friends in the Monroe area. He invited the music teacher he had through all 12 grades at Black Hawk in South Wayne, Irv Wehrmann, to play piano on a cut from one of Anderson's albums - an invitation that "made his year, and it made my day when he came back to do it," Anderson said.

Anderson has built a loyal following over the years. He can read a dancefloor and pull out a crowd-pleasing song at just the right moment ("I call 'em cheaters.") He's also happy to dedicate songs to regular fans, whether the song is "Waltz Across Texas" or "Who the Hell is Alice?"

He's also skilled at drawing people out of their shell. His sister-in-law, Barb Meier, has been yodeling with him at least 25 years, by her estimate. The first time, he had to feed her the lyrics she was so unsure of herself. Now she has about 10 or 12 songs she can yodel with him, including "Teach Me How to Yodel" and "Swiss Vagabond."

"I've always been a shy person, but he got that out of me," she said. "He's just full of fun. He likes the music and he likes the people."

But the grind of three to four gigs a week, on top of his job as a road carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, has worn him down. For years, while other people kicked back and went to a fish fry on a Friday night, he was lugging band gear to the first of the weekend's several gigs. He retired from the Monroe post office in November and now he's ready to put down his accordion, too, and spend more time with his grandchildren.

"I missed four kids growing up. I'm not going to miss my grandkids," he said. He's also fighting cancer for the third time in six years. He still feels relatively healthy of body, "but my mind said, 'Regroup.'"

His fan base is aging, too. At his last Sunday afternoon dance at Turner Hall, very few are under the age of 50 or 60. Anderson said he hopes another local accordionist, Jason Rowe of The Rowe Brothers, will carry on the tradition.

"The kids we really need out there," he said. "If they did it two times, they'd realize how fun it is."

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As for Ditzenberger, she may be hanging up her dancing shoes after New Year's Eve.

"You know the fiscal cliff? I'm on what you call a dancing cliff," she said. "I've danced to him my whole life. I think I'm done."

Back at that Sunday afternoon dance at Turner Hall a couple of weeks ago, she organized a party honoring Anderson. There was cake. Dancers wore matching Greg Anderson Band T-shirts. For weeks beforehand, Ditzenberger collected messages from fans into a scrapbook for him.

He ended the dance with a sing-along of "God Bless America," with everyone standing in a circle holding raised hands. Afterward, people crowded around Anderson to give him a hug or handshake and wish him well. Tears welled up in the eyes of one elderly woman as she walked away.

Anderson isn't through with music entirely, however. He'll still play the occasional wedding or private party. Ditzenberger is already planning on it.

"My grandson's getting married," she said.