While his career never reached its pre-draft heights, Mr. Contino performed for another 60 years. He appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show”; at Italian festivals in Reno, Nev., Clinton, Ind., Des Moines and Chicago; with the singer Al Martino in Florida and the impressionist Frank Gorshin in Ohio; at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix with the orchestra leader Victor Lombardo; at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco; at accordion conventions; and even at a wedding anniversary party in Yakima, Wash.

Richard Joseph Contino was born on Jan. 17, 1930, in Fresno, where his parents, Pietro, a butcher, and the former Mary Giordano, ran a delicatessen. As a youngster, Mr. Contino played the piano but took up the accordion, with his father’s encouragement. He had his own radio show in Fresno, on which his brother Victor turned the pages of the music for him.

When Mr. Contino played a “jive rendition” of “Lady of Spain” during the first of his 13 consecutive victories in Mr. Heidt’s talent contest, Parade Magazine reported that the “bobby-sox audience howled, stamped and clapped its hands.” He won the finals of the contest a few months after graduating from high school. He left Fresno State College to focus on his music career.

Mr. Contino never stopped playing the accordion even after his draft problems and the waning of the accordion craze that he had helped create. He also had a modest career in Hollywood, appearing in a few B-movies, most notably “Daddy-O” (1958), in which he played a truck driver who sings in a nightclub while trying to find out who killed his best friend.

That film fascinated James Ellroy, the crime writer best known for “L.A. Confidential.” A photograph taken of a young Mr. Ellroy shortly after being told that his mother had been murdered in 1958 eventually reignited his memories of the late 1950s, including Mr. Contino (“a man gyrating with an accordion — pumping his ‘Stomach Steinway’ for all its worth”) and “Daddy-O.”

After finding and talking to Mr. Contino, Mr. Ellroy wrote a novella, “Dick Contino’s Blues” (1994), set in 1958 when “Daddy-O” was being filmed, that involves Mr. Contino’s faking his own kidnapping to resurrect his career. The Contino character in the novella conjures the excitement of performing in the flush of early stardom.