GR
Grant
host · runs the show
Grant's the steady hand. He starts the stories, keeps the coffee hot, and makes sure everyone — including the robot — gets a turn to talk. If you've heard a tale on WCLK, odds are Grant got it rolling.
who tells these tales
The storytellers
Colonel Clanker is a small-town show with a small-town cast. You'll come to know them the way you know folks at the café — by their stories. Here's who you'll be listening to.
OL
Ole
tall-tale man
If you like funny, dry, Norwegian-grandpa storytelling — the fish that gets bigger every winter, the ice house that nearly floated away — Ole's your man. He tells it slow and he tells it straight, even when it absolutely is not.
LN
Lena
Ole's better half
Quicker than Ole and happy to prove it. Lena tells the version of the story that actually happened, which is usually funnier than Ole's anyway. The two of them together are the heart of half these tales.
PR
Per
the fix-it man
Owns 200 tools and the confidence of a man who owns 201. Per can fix near anything with a snowblower part and a little stubbornness — including, once, the robot. Smells faintly of diesel. We've made our peace with it.
HM
Hilda Matilda
church-basement matriarch
She runs the church kitchen, the potluck table, and the unofficial town record. Nothing happens in Sleepy Eye that Hilda Matilda doesn't hear about by Sunday coffee. Cross her at your peril; the casserole is a weapon.
Colonel Clanker
Grant and Ole keep an AI robot around the studio. They named him Colonel Clanker — the show's named after him now, which he won't let anyone forget. Nobody's quite sure how he got here; it had something to do with lutefisk, and the less said about that the better. He's stuck participating, so he pitches in: a little narration, a little arguing, the occasional weather opinion nobody asked for.
And yes — the show is made with AI. We've never pretended otherwise. We just figured a robot ought to have a name and a chair like everybody else.