Clellan Card (June 24, 1903–April 13, 1966) was an on-air personality at the Minnesota Television station WCCO best known for the dozen years when he played Axel Torgeson on the local children's show Axel and His Dog. Card was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and spent most of his life in the Twin Cities region, although he attended Rutgers College in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He dropped out of Rutgers in 1926, moved back with his parents, and worked at various jobs before starting in radio. His first broadcasting job was doing voice work for a fishing tackle commercial. [1]
Minnesota is a state in the Upper Midwest and northern regions of the United States. Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd U.S. state on May 11, 1858, created from the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory. The state has a large number of lakes, and is known by the slogan the "Land of 10,000 Lakes". Its official motto is L'Étoile du Nord.
WCCO is a commercial AM radio station in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and owned by Entercom. Its offices and studios are located in the Entercom Building at 625 Second Avenue South in downtown Minneapolis. WCCO features talk radio, news and sports programming, with local hosts heard most hours of the day and evening. World and national news is supplied by CBS News Radio. Overnight, WCCO carries the syndicated CBS Sports Radio Network.
New Brunswick is a city in Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States, in the New York City metropolitan area. The city is the county seat of Middlesex County, and the home of Rutgers University. New Brunswick is on the Northeast Corridor rail line, 27 miles (43 km) southwest of Manhattan, on the southern bank of the Raritan River. As of 2016, New Brunswick had a Census-estimated population of 56,910, representing a 3.1% increase from the 55,181 people enumerated at the 2010 United States Census, which in turn had reflected an increase of 6,608 (+13.6%) from the 48,573 counted in the 2000 Census. Due to the concentration of medical facilities in the area, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and Saint Peter's University Hospital, as well as Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick is known as both the Hub City and the Healthcare City. The corporate headquarters and production facilities of several global pharmaceutical companies are situated in the city, including Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
He married Marion Satterlee in 1928 and had three boys from their union, Clellan Peter, 1929, John Brooke, 1934, and Michael Satterlee, 1939.
The Axel character, a loony "Scandihoovian," was created by Card in the late 1930s on a morning radio show on WCCO AM called Almanac of the Air. [1]
Scandinavia is a region in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties. The term Scandinavia in local usage covers the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The majority national languages of these three, belong to the Scandinavian dialect continuum, and are mutually intelligible North Germanic languages. In English usage, Scandinavia also refers to the Scandinavian Peninsula, or to the broader region including Finland and Iceland, which is always known locally as the Nordic countries.
Card suffered great losses in September, 1952, and January, 1953, when the oldest two of his three children died in separate accidents. His son Peter died in an Air Force training crash in San Angelo, Texas, and John died in an automobile accident in Minneapolis. It is believed by those who knew him well that these events led Card to focus his broadcast talents toward children.
Axel and His Dog went on the air the first time on August 5, 1954. Donald Stolz, founder of the Old Log Theater, played Towser, the dog, and soon added Tallulah the cat as well. Local singer and entertainer Mary Davies played Carmen the Nurse. In October 1954, the show was the first local program in the Twin Cities to be broadcast in color, using an experimental system. [1]
The Old Log Theatre is the oldest professional theater in the state of Minnesota. It is sometimes cited as the oldest continuously operating professional theater in the United States.
Color, or colour, is the characteristic of human visual perception described through color categories, with names such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple. This perception of color derives from the stimulation of cone cells in the human eye by electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associated with objects through the wavelength of the light that is reflected from them. This reflection is governed by the object's physical properties such as light absorption, emission spectra, etc.
In January 1959, its rating was nearly three times that of the nearest competitor, American Bandstand . A memorable live event at Excelsior Amusement Park at Lake Minnetonka in 1958 saw an attendance of 12,000.
American Bandstand is an American music-performance and dance television program that aired in various versions from 1952 to 1989, and was hosted from 1956 until its final season by Dick Clark, who also served as the program's producer. It featured teenagers dancing to Top 40 music introduced by Clark; at least one popular musical act—over the decades, running the gamut from Jerry Lee Lewis to Run–D.M.C.—would usually appear in person to lip-sync one of their latest singles. Freddy Cannon holds the record for most appearances, at 110.
In the early 1960s, Card was diagnosed with lymphoma, though few people outside of WCCO knew of his condition. He continued to do the show as long as possible, but was admitted to Abbott Hospital in April 1966, and died eight days later. Carmen the Nurse went on the air the following day to inform viewers of what happened. A memorial fund was set up, with $5,600 raised in the next two months. Roughly half of the money came in small donations of coins from children. [1]
Abbott Hospital is a former hospital building in the Stevens Square neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The hospital was originally built in 1910, with several additions up until 1958. The hospital eventually merged with Northwestern Hospital in 1970 to form Abbott Northwestern Hospital, and the Abbott Hospital building closed in 1980.
The Pavek Museum of Broadcasting inducted Card into its hall of fame for Minnesota broadcasters in 2002. [2]
The Pavek Museum is a museum in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, United States, which has one of the world's most significant collections of vintage radio and television equipment. It originated in the collection of Joe Pavek, who began squirreling away unique radios while he was an instructor at Dunwoody Institute in 1946. Students of the day were given old radios to disassemble in order to learn their trade, and Pavek was concerned about what might be destroyed in the process.
