ISHPEMING – Carl Pellonpaa, face of the iconic Finnish-American television program “Finland Calling” for over 50 years, has announced he’ll be retiring and ending the show at the end of the month. Pellonpaa said the last episode of the show – the only largely Finnish-language television show in the U.S. – will air March 29, just a few days after the 53rd anniversary of the first broadcast in 1962.

In the shows early year’s, “we felt when the old Finns died, the program would end. That didn’t turn out to be true,” Pellonpaa said. “I never thought it would last this long. Gee whiz, 53 years old really soon. It’s been fun, it really has.”

Pellonpaa and WLUC began airing “Finland Calling” – “Suomi Kuutsu” in Finnish – in 1962 when Pellonpaa was working as a weather man for the station, he said. The idea came from the owner of several U.P. travel agencies, who thought the show would inspire people to travel to Finland.

Since then, Pellonpaa said, he’s led 34 tours with over 1,000 people to his ancestral homeland. He’s also served as an honorary consul of Finland and Grand Marshall of FinnFest, helped lead the a revival in Finnish language and music in the U.P., and interviewed Finnish presidents, a prime minister and numerous celebrities.

“That was the fun part of the job,” Pellonpaa said of the interviews.

Jim Kurtti, director of the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock and current honorary consul of Finland, said Pellonpaa and Finland Calling were major influences for generations of Finnish-Americans.

“I’ve told Carl, as a child when we got a television the first program I remember watching was ‘Suomi Kuutsu,'” Kurtti said. “People from my generation and earlier, they were really encouraged to become Americanized. We were supposed to throw it all off. The program gave (Finnish culture) a strong sense of being valid. We had this program dedicated to Finnish, and it was important to people that they had that.”

Pellonpaa said he was born in Ishpeming, where he still lives today, but both is parents were native Finns and both Finnish and English were spoken around the house.

“When my father came in the house, we spoke Finn,” he remembered. “I had older sisters and a brother who had been in school, and taught my mother English, but when he came in it was Finn.”

For most of its run, the show offered a similar mix of languages, Pellonpaa said. Originally, he said, it was meant to be all Finnish, excepting “when the mind goes blank and I had to revert to a bit of Finn English.”

Quickly, however, he and producers realized the show’s audience extended beyond Finnish speakers, and adjusted accordingly.

“We heard, ‘I like the show but don’t know what you’re talking about,’ so I would repeat things in English. That started in the mid ’60s.”

One big facet of the show and Pellonpaa’s legacy has been Finnish dance music, and the Suomi Kuutsu dances he’s been hosting almost since the beginning of the show. The first dance, he said, was at the Ishpeming Armory.

“The place was jammed,” he said. “Tickets were only $1 at the time, and they came. Right during the height of the dance a guy dropped dead on the floor. I said ‘This is it, I’m not doing that anymore.’ But a good friend said ‘Look at it this way, he died with his boots on.’ He said ‘Don’t stop, they enjoy this.'”

Pellonpaa said the biggest dance ever was at the South Range Community Building, in 1966, when his wife, running the door, reported 866 tickets sold.

“I told her we have to stop selling tickets, but people said they’re going anyhow. I don’t know how many ultimately came,” he said. The dance was on the second floor, and “if you went downstairs, you could see the floor moving,” he remembered.

The final Suomi Kuutsu dance, celebrating Finland Calling’s 53rd anniversary and Pellonpaa’s retirement, and filmed for the final show, will be held March 22 at the Elks Lodge in Ishpeming.

At one time, Kurtti said, Finnish cultural events were on the decline, but there are now “enough events you can’t go to them all, if you count gallery shows and dances.” “Finland Calling,” he said, has played a huge role in the current resurgence.

“I’m concerned it’s going to leave quite a void,” he said. “A whole medium is gone, there won’t be a Finnish program anywhere.”

The final four episodes of “Finland Calling” will air at 10:30 a.m. Sundays through March 29.