Nancy Nelson was a blur as she readied her new shop, Our Little Secret, for its grand opening a few weeks ago. She had lots of help transforming the storefront, which is across the street from the former Lyndale Garden Center in Richfield. Aged relatives stuck price tags on bric-a-brac. Daughter Susan and grandchildren Sarah and Megan uncrated fashion accessories and decorative objects. Nelson’s husband, veteran WCCO news anchor Bill Carlson, attended to middle-management tasks as visiting friends were charmed into service arranging merchandise. All the while, Nelson—best known in recent years as the reigning queen of infomercials—buzzed around, clearly in command of the mission’s complex logistics. And with the same tsunami-strength enthusiasm she used to pitch Power-Flo paint rollers and Juiceman II Automatic Juice Extractors to insomniacs, Nelson made it all seem like fun.
Nelson is pep personified, a product of the showbiz gene pool that brought us such spunky girls-next-door as Mary Tyler Moore and Katie Couric. Propelled by 1000-megawatt moxie and more than a smidgen of wholesome sex appeal, she worked her way from community theater to newscasting to late-night As Seen On TV fame. As a teen in the mid-60s, she made her professional stage debut at the Old Log Theater in The Impossible Years. Her entrance, in a bikini, prompted her father to exclaim from the audience, “Oh my God, Florence!” That reaction was echoed in many local households when Nelson became a miniskirted late-night weathergirl for WCCO-TV. “People started to recognize me after that,” she recalled. “They’d say, ‘I don’t know your face, but the ankles are familiar.’ ”
For years, Nelson and anchorwoman Pat Miles were the Mary Ann and Ginger of Twin Cities television, friendly rivals for the unofficial title of Hottest News Personality. Nelson graciously yields to Miles in the looks department (“I’ve got the second-best boobs in the market,” she once told a local media reporter), but she’s second to none when it comes to perkiness.
The woman also has a serious knickknack habit. Her new store is so overstuffed with merchandise, it suggests an aggressively girly version of Ali Baba’s cavern. There are paisley Pashmina shawls, bejeweled watches, lacquered fountain pens, pop-up picture books, and iridescent glass lamps that would make a peacock look drab. All of it was acquired through the network of wholesale vendors Nelson met as a pitchwoman—and, of course, purchased at low, low prices, with the savings passed on to you!
Nelson got her business education young, tagging along with her father in his Flav-O-Rite Sausage delivery truck. In the process, she got to know everyone from the guys behind the meat-market counter to customers at the mom-and-pop corner stores.
Performing came naturally. As an only child, Nelson said, she was always entertaining “the mirror, the cat, the dog, or any unfortunate visitors.” Her second-grade teacher arranged for her to study drama at the MacPhail Center for the Performing Arts. There, she acted alongside high school students and told everyone her future plans were “to go to Broadway and be a star.” At 17, while hostessing at a Perkins, a customer told her to shelve her Broadway plans and come work for him at KMSP-TV. By the time she was a Roosevelt High School senior in 1964, Nelson was hosting Date with Dino, a live, daily teen-dance program that ran for a year on Channel 9. She learned to ad-lib commercials alongside spielmeister Mel Jass, the WTCN Matinee Movie host renowned for his ability to improvise sixty-second pitches without rehearsal or cue cards. At the Old Log, she played romantic ingénue parts opposite Nick Nolte for half a decade.
Nelson’s sincerity on camera led to positions anchoring newscasts and talk shows in the Twin Cities—where she spent the first dozen years of her marriage to Carlson as his on-air competitor—and in Los Angeles. She eventually found her niche in chatty, long-form commercials, convincing America that the Popeil Food Dehydrator was “fun!” Ron Popeil bought a mansion and a yacht with the proceeds; Nelson got a modest paycheck but also public renown and respect in her peculiar industry. The CBS Morning News called her “the best-known and most effective TV saleswoman on the planet,” and, in fact, her work has been seen around the world, from Russia to Malaysia. These days, she not only hosts but also produces and creates TV infomercial campaigns.
Flitting about her store, Nelson showed off its inventory with the wide-eyed wonderment she brought to hawking George Foreman’s Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Every item elicited a “Wow!” a “Look at this!” or an “Isn’t that great?” Since Nelson plans to personally greet and assist customers at the store, a trip there promises to offer patrons both a shopping experience and a sort of personal show.
Nelson’s husband beamed as he watched her in action and pointed out a pair of gold bumblebee ornaments on Nelson’s denim shirt. He explained that he’s made it a tradition to give her jewelry that features bees. “Aerodynamically, a bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly,” he said. “But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it just soars merrily along. That’s Nancy.”
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