Nancy Nelson
Natural Talent & an Abiding Love Have Enriched Her Life
By Dean S. Potter

Nancy Nelson and Bill Carlson – like Steve and Sharon or Frank and Amelia, it is hard to imagine one half of this classic Minnesota couple without the other. Yet, in Bill and Nancy’s case, they crafted individual careers that brought each of them their own spotlight and created fans who knew them not only for their work in front of the camera, but also for their deep affection for one another.

Nancy Nelson loved her husband, Bill Carlson, as he did her. After Bill’s passing from prostate cancer last year the strength of that love shown at his visitation in the Old Log Theater in Excelsior and memorial service at

the State Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. “Billy belonged to the public of Minnesota. They were his other family. They liked him and he liked them, so it’s only right that this is public,” said Nancy.

This year Nancy worked with the American Cancer Society helping to create the Bill Carlson Cancer Awareness Award with Bill being its first recipient. He received it posthumously at the Society’s 2009 Hope Grows Gala at the Minneapolis Marriott Center on May 30th. Nancy, Bill’s daughter Susan Michelson, and granddaughters Sarah and Megan accepted the award for him.

Nancy met Bill when she was 17. She was co-hosting a local teen-age TV show patterned after American Bandstand called A Date with Dino. She was in her senior year at Minneapolis Roosevelt high school and it gave her a great opportunity to meet and network with successful and talented theater and broadcast personalities.

Although A Date with Dino was her first professional gig, it was by no means the start of her career. A Miss Tocci, her second grade teacher at Minnehaha Elementary School, should be given credit for that. She knew Nancy’s ability well and suggested to her parents that they enroll Nancy in Macphail Center for the Arts and with a drama teacher named Hazel Aamodt.

Aamodt was so impressed with Nancy she placed the second grader in an older group called the Jack and Jill Players made up of junior high and high school students who performed plays on the weekends in churches, nursing homes and elsewhere.

TV pitchman and movie host Mel Jass gave Nancy her second start on television by making her the co-host on his Mel’s Matinee Movie over WTCN (now KARE 11) TV.

“I learn so much from Mel, watching him do those commercials. He never had a script and he would just take the count down right on the button every time,” Nancy remembered.

While on Jass’ show, Old Log Theater founder Don Stolz auditioned Nancy and she played the Excelsior theater’s boards for almost 20 years.

Soon she got a call from artist and WCCO TV producer Dick Stuck to be the weather girl on long time friend and mentor Bill Carlson’s This Must Be the Place Saturday evening show.

And an interesting weather girl she made. “I would put on these go-go boots and mini skirt and they would spread this (United States) map across the floor and the camera would go way up overhead and I would walk around the map on the floor and stop in these different cities with the temperature and they would take a shot of my legs and the temperature on the floor. So the joke was, ‘I don’t recognize your face but the ankles are familiar.’”

Don Dahl, a WCCO TV sports anchor, was emceeing a bowling show (Bowlarama) telecast Sunday afternoons from different bowling alleys around the Twin Cities. He asked Nancy if she would be his princess of prizes. If a bowler would bowl a strike on the air, Nancy dressed to the nines with a Royal Crown Cola cooler held out in front of her would run across the floor in spike heels and present the cooler to the bowler.

Giving those Royal Crown Coolers and the weather while playing parts on the Old Log’s stage paid her tuition at the University of Minnesota. While at the U she also indulged in other activities—she entered beauty pageants. In the Miss United States Pageant she was Miss Minnesota and second runner up to Miss United States. She later entered the International Beauty Pageant and became Miss Minnesota for the second time.

Yes, she was a busy young lady and, “Somewhere along the way when I was 21, 22 years old, Bill and I became romantically involved. He was divorced at the time and I think it came as a real surprise to both of us; we had been such good friends for years. I was 17 when we became good friends. Boy, it surprised me! By the time I was 23 and Bill 35 going on 36, we were married.”

Bill’s good friend, WCCO radio’s Charlie Boone was best man and Nancy’s close childhood friend Susan Reed was bridesmaid. To make everything complete, friend and singer John Denver wrote and dedicated his “Follow Me” to Bill and Nancy and sang it at their wedding.

Follow me where I go what I do
and who I know
Make it part of you to be part of me
follow me up and down all the way
and all around
Take my hand and say you’ll follow me

The last chorus of the song ends: Take my hand and I will follow you.

For 37 plus years of blissful marriage Bill and Nancy followed each other in love, sharing happiness through good and bad times, not being deterred by the final years of Bill’s cancer.

In 1972 Nancy was asked co-host along with WTCN’s Warren Martin an interview show called What’s New. She said yes and was on the air from 11:30 to 1:00 competing with Bill’s WCCO’s Mid Day News. The same guests — writers, actors and musicians — the popular entertainers of the day appeared on both their shows, oftentimes on the same day. Nancy was on What’s New for 13 years.

Bill and Nancy were good at what they did and movie companies began hiring the duo to interview their stars in different cities before movie openings. This led to covering the Academy Awards on the red carpet every year and traveling the world for the movie companies. As their reputation grew, offers for their services from New York and mostly Hollywood kept coming in. Traveling was okay, but relocation was a no no.

Bill was very close to his daughter Susan from his first marriage, as was Nancy. “We had pretty much shared custody with Bill’s ex-wife and her husband so Susie was with us a great deal of the time,” says Nancy.

“Our commitment was to be here with Susie, have her in school here, raised in Minnesota, so we made up our minds that we would make a fraction of the money, stay here in Minnesota and never look back and never regret it.”

There was nothing to regret in their marriage, their love was too strong for that. They liked traveling for business and pleasure both. Their first trip as a married couple was their honeymoon trip to New York where they took in seven Broadway plays in five days. They liked diversity and the theater, so they returned to New York often. Their favorite place, though, was Hawaii – which they visited a total of 34 times.

Those trips, taken together, were for pleasure. Business trips, on the other hand, often sent them in opposite directions, one in the Twin Cities and the other in Paris, for example. Of course when they were that far away from each other (or even in the same city) they always contacted each other by phone more than once a day, some days several times.

“If you asked anybody who Billy worked with, he was always saying, ‘I’m going to call Nancy.’”
They wanted to share every thing, says Nancy. “I don’t mean we sat down and had these long conversations. Billy would call and say, ‘quick turn on CNN so and so is talking.’ ‘OK honey.’ The conversation might have been ten seconds long but we had this desperate need to connect, touch, and communicate. We did that whether we were in Minneapolis or one of us was on the other side of the country or frequently on the other end of the world. We agreed that our communication was so important that it was going to be more important than what the long distant cost.”

When Susie graduated from high school, Nancy received an offer to anchor a Los Angeles TV newscast. It was a hard decision for her to make —it meant relocation. But Bill told her: “Look, we know all the reasons you would turn it down, but this is one of the opportunities of a person’s career. Presumably you climb to the top if you get to anchor news in Los Angeles or New York. My concern is that if you turn it down you could spend the rest of your life saying, ‘what if.’ So try it.”

Nancy did, but still came home weekends. She flew to Los Angeles Sunday nights, anchored the news Monday through Friday and flew home Friday nights.

After three years the station was sold and the newsroom was cleared of its personnel. At the same time, producers starting the Shop Television Network. funded by JC Penny, approached Nancy in Los Angeles. Signing on to this new venture, she went on to sell products on camera for another three years. Then JC Penny ran out of money.

Waiting in the wings, though, was another new form of television programming–the infomercial–just made for Nancy. Forbes magazine placed her as one of the ten most effective sales people on television and CBS dubbed her “Queen of Infomercials.”

Then a shadow came over their lives. Bill was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000. Things didn’t look too bad then, but in 2006 it came back with a vengeance and spread to his liver.

He spent the next 18 months battling it, but this time to no avail.

Nancy and Bill knew what the outcome was going to be, but they talked about living, never talked about dying, holding on to what they had left. One day in February 2008 Bill said to Nancy, “The only thing I mind about this is that I don’t want to leave you.”

On February 29, 2008 Nancy was holding her Billy in her arms when he left.

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