Perhaps the best-remembered running gag on Axel and His Dog involved Tallulah's aunt, who lived in the Minneapolis suburb of Anoka. Clellan and Don had great fun talking about her feline abode without ever explicitly using one particular phrase. "Tallulah the cat was always going to visit her aunt's house in Anoka," Don recalled. "If you wanted to perceive it as a cat house, well, there it was -- but it was never said in that way."

Tallulah's aunt was a topic of conversation quite often, under all kinds of circumstances. One day Axel turned to Tallulah and inquired, "Was you at Sunday School today, Tallool?"

"Oh, yeah," affirmed the cat.

"That's good, that's fine," burbled Axel. "How is your Sunday School teacher? Is she that cute one what I seen one day?"

"You know what?" Tallulah interjected. "She's from Anoka."

"Oh, iss she from Anoka?" he said, his interest growing. "Do you s'pose she knows yer aunt over to Anoka?"

"No," Tallulah replied. "I asked her."

"She's never been over to yer aunt's house, hah?" Axel said dubiously. "Well, I suppose there'll be a time when she'll be gettin' over dere."

Tallulah's aunt apparently presided over a real den of iniquity. Not only was it a cat house, it also housed Tallulah's catnip stash. "Oh, Tallool, you look cute this morning," Axel began cheerfully one day. "Say, Towser was over here, you know, a while ago, and he says he has some dognip today. Yessir, and he wondered if you would probably take your dish of catnip and go out with him this afternoon to a movie."

"No, I'm out," Tallulah sniffled. "Out of catnip. I have to go back to Anoka."

"Is dat where you keep your supply, over dere?" asked Axel.

Tallulah nodded. "My aunt's house."

"Oh, yeah, I know yer aunt," Axel groused. "Don't bring up yer aunt again. Things are liable to get a little upset here, see. Yer aunt has loused things up before, so we might as well leave her out of the pitcher here today."

Perhaps the closest they came to actually saying "cat house" was one Sunday morning when Tallulah complained to Axel that her catnip had been stolen. "No kiddin'! They stole your catnip!" he exclaimed. "Did you call your aunt about it up to Anoka?"

"No," Tallulah confessed.

"You deent, hah? Oh, diss is wery serious," Axel said gravely. "You mean to say your whole supply of catnip for the next thirty days has disappeared?"

"All of it," replied the cat.

"I declare," he mused. "In what house did you have the catnip -- where was you keepin' it?"

"In the Tree House," Tallulah said, "not the catnip house."

In fact, that entire episode was devoted to solving the mystery of who stole Tallulah's catnip. Although she had merely misplaced her stash, it was an indication of how important the kitty herb Nepeta cataria was in the Tree House scheme of things. In retrospect, Axel and his cat made an astonishing number of references to catnip as a mind-altering substance. Had the program aired during the psychedelic days of the late 1960s, it seems likely that Clellan would have been censured for making veiled allusions to drug use. In those more innocent times, though, no one noticed -- even when he explicitly spoke of getting a buzz.

As Axel greeted the kids one morning, Towser relentlessly bops him on the head with a rolled-up sheet of paper. "What are you doing, hittin' me like dat?" he asks in exasperation. "Dat's Towser, always pickin' on me! Lookit, he hit me right in da head, and it kinda makes me dizzy -- I don't wanna fall out of da treehouse, Towser, please!" The dog then begins to pull down Axel's suspenders, his favorite trick. "What -- Don't pull my suspenders!" Axel pleads. "What do you want diss morn- ?" Then he turns to the audience and exclaims, "I've never saw a dog so hopped up! He must have been into Tallulah's catnip, see, because Tallulah had some double-strength catnip last week."

"Arf, arf, arf!" barks the pooch in delirious confirmation.

Axel chortles, "So you've been into da catnip, eh? Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

There were hints of alcoholic beverages in the Tree House as well. It wasn't unusual for Axel to make a comment like, "I think I'll have a coupla shots of milk and lay down for a while." One sunny Fourth of July afternoon, Axel and Tallulah talked about going on a picnic to Minnehaha Falls, with catnip à la mode and Bosco highballs on the menu. In the 1960s, an esoteric brew called Hector's Nectar became the rage in the Treehouse.

Another time, Axel was boasting about the scope of his knowledge. "I learned all dat in my higher education, y'know," he says jauntily, then turns to Towser and asks, "How high did you get in school?"

"Rrrr!" the mutt mutters in reply.

Axel, a trifle surprised, says, "Oh, you never did any drinkin' in school, huh?"

copyright 1999 by Julian West