Name preference: Gene
Born: July 3, 1939, Cumberland Hospital, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Parents: Bernhardt Luvig Nelson and Jennie Anderson Nelson
Siblings: Robert Andrew Nelson , Warren Bernhardt Nelson , Richard Louis Nelson , Allen Clifford Nelson , Marilyn Nelson Crossley , and Howard Lawrence Nelson
Grade school: PS 140 and PS 140A, 1945-1953
High School: Brooklyn Technical High School, 1953-1957
College: Pratt Institute, School of Architecture (two weeks Sept 1957)
Military Service: U.S. Army October 1958 –October 1960; Basic Training, Ft. Dix, New Jersey; Radio Operator training, Ft. Dix; stationed 709th MP Battalion Hq Company Intel & Ops, Frankfurt, Germany
Married: Anne Mackey Nelson, January 21, 1961, South Reformed Church, Brooklyn, NY
Children: Sandra Nelson Fite, Karen Nelson Jewell, Christopher John Nelson
As of this writing (February 2009) I am the younger of the two remaining Nelson children born to Bernie and Jennie Nelson, and the last male. I will be 70 in July and sister Marilyn will be 72 in October. The older one gets, the more memories one has to share. However, I’ll try to let the links fill in a lot of material so this bio doesn’t become endless in itself.
For me, growing up in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn evokes fond memories of wonderful times. You can’t live in such congestion without making friends. And being born into a large family, you discover friends in family. We inherited street games from the older generation, discovered new games of our own, and passed them all down to the next generation. Summer became the time for stickball, more games, and YMCA day camp.
Given our close proximity to grandparents, our visits to them were fairly regular.
Grade school was also fun for me. The encouragement I received from Mom and Dad, my older brothers and Marilyn, and from my teachers always seemed to spur me on. I did so well that I became the valedictorian of my eighth grade graduating class in June 1953. Actually, my good friend, Michael Rowland from 58th Street had better grades than I, and he was supposed to be the valedictorian. However, Michael was bypassed due to a speech impediment, and the honors given to me. In hindsight I wish I had the foresight to recognize the injustice at the time, and then have the testicular fortitude to correct the situation. For the next four years Michael and I rode the subway to our new school, Brooklyn Tech (brothers Bob and Warren’s alma mater), where I majored in Architectural Drafting and Design during the third and fourth years.
My romantic fantasies began when I was about eleven or twelve. I remember being in love with this beautiful nineteen-year-old girl from church, Doris Mueller, who was sweet on brother Allen, eleven years older than me. Doris owned a cream colored 1949 Ford sedan, and she used to take Howie and me for rides. I had my first kiss from Cissy Myrdahl, brother Bob’s niece-in-law. Cissy was a year younger than me. We boldly stood on the corner of 4th Avenue and 56th Street and engaged in what seemed like an eternal kiss, just like in those romance movies of the day. At about thirteen I was sweet on a girl from Senator Street named Edith Lactis, who had a twin sister Margaret. We met at a South Reformed Youth Group. When I began high school my focus was on schoolwork, and romance was put on hold.
However, in the summer of 1955, at the “mature” age of sixteen, I was walking our family dog, Whiskers, on 4th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, and I saw a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl walking her family dog, Mickey. The girl’s name was Anne Mackey, and I knew I was in love. Three months later, on October 29th I asked her to go steady. For the next five years or so our relationship was an on-again off-again courtship, and we finally stopped resisting one another on January 21, 1961 – our wedding day. Incidentally, our dogs were the only ones that either family had ever owned, so we can only conclude that they served their mutual purpose in bringing Anne and me together.
When Anne and I married I had been working for a few months as a junior draftsman for Babcock and Wilcock in Manhattan. Anne worked as a secretary receptionist for Climax Molybdenum, also in Manhattan. We decided to leave the city and make an adventurous move to Richmondville in upstate New York, where brother Allen had moved his family years earlier. Anne and I had no car, and neither of us had a driver’s license; there was never a need for either in New York City. So for the next several months I rode with someone to my job at Sperry Rand in Cobleskill, the next larger town a few miles east. Because I had two weeks of college, they trained me as a time-study analyst, setting rates for employees doing piecework. When the plant relocated to Tonawanda near Buffalo, I secured a job with General Electric in Schenectady as a draftsman trainee. By then I had acquired a driver’s license and my first car, an eight-year old 1953 Buick.
Anne and I moved to Schenectady, NY. I was working at GE for three months when, in November 1962 I finally landed a job with an architect, Leon Einhorn, in Albany, NY for $80.00 per week. Not long after that Einhorn expressed that he was pleased with my work, and he raised my salary to $85.00 per week. In the meantime, sister Marilyn and her husband Ken Kroth moved to Latham, NY. Ken was hired as the church organist and choir director for a large prestigious church in Albany. Anne and I were struggling financially, so Marilyn and Ken offered to let us move in with them for a short while. It was early 1963 when Anne and I found a nice apartment at 364 Quail Street in Albany. She also landed a good job as a secretary with a special project development unit of AT&T.
In February 1964 I started a new job as a draftsman for Lux and Quackenbush, Architects, in the Delaware and Hudson Building in downtown Albany. My architectural career was beginning to blossom. In 1965 Anne’s younger brother, Frank Mackey, owned a gas station and repair shop in Commack, Long Island. He was close with some of the salesmen at a car dealership across the street, and when a 1961 four-door, black Chevy Impala with 6500 miles on it came through the dealership, Frank snagged it before they put it on the lot for sale. Anne and I took the trip from Albany to test drive the car, and we bought it for $850.00. When we took possession, the odometer read 33,000 miles. The dealer had to push the mileage ahead because no one would believe a four-year-old car would have only 6500 miles on the engine, but we knew it to be true.
After a few years of us enjoying the trying process, Anne finally became pregnant early in 1965. That summer we were at the movies watching “Sound of Music” when the great blackout hit the northeastern United States. We got rain checks and saw the movie again later. On September 24th, 1965 Anne gave birth to our first child, Sandra Lynn, who was born at Albany Medical Center. Three months later Anne was pregnant again, and on September 13th, 1966 she gave Sandra a little sister, Karen Elizabeth, at St. Peter’s hospital, where I just happened to be heavily involved in a renovation project. There were several “field trips” to the project for me for a few days thereafter!
In February 1967 we made our move to buy our first house – brother Warren’s family house at 10 Prospect Lane, Pinecliff Lake, West Milford, New Jersey – across the lane from my parents. The house was originally a summer cottage that Warren and Louise added on to (based on a design I did for them), and then they converted it to a year-round home. I secured a job with John Robert Gilchrist, an architect in Bergenfield, NJ, an hour’s commute from West Milford. For the next seven years my architectural career was quite secure. Gilchrist was the best architect I ever worked for; he was a true gentleman and a scholar. To help our finances a little better, Anne began working nights at a local nursing home while I stayed home with the girls.
However, in the early seventies Anne and I had a yen for warmer climes, particularly after our fantastic Bermuda cruise in June of ’73. Brother Dick had just moved his family to Spencer, NC, as did Anne’s brother Frank and his family. By November ’74 I was working for an architect in High Point while living with Frank and Jackie temporarily, and by Christmas Anne and the girls were with me in our “new” ten-room house that was built in 1924, and was sorely in need of remodeling. What began as a hobby for me with remodeling the house turned into a full-time maintenance venture that never ended until we sold it more than twenty years later.
In the meantime I was laid off in the spring of ’76, so I tried my hand at selling real estate, a mistake that took me six months to realize. With a surprise child on the way, in February ’77 I desperately took a job as a cutting room supervisor for a local furniture manufacturer in Salisbury, thanks to the relative of a next-door neighbor. Two months later Chris, our son was born. For the next four years I felt like a fish out of water as I humbly endured the struggle where, for the first time in my working career, I had a job I did not like.
Fortune opened another door for me in February of ’81 when I had the opportunity to get back into design/drafting at Fuchs Systems in Salisbury. My gratitude showed in my enthusiasm for the opportunity, which was in turn rewarded with a quick climb up the ladder of designing electric arc furnaces for the steel industry, where scrap steel is melted into new steel at an average rate of 100 tons per hour. I began traveling all over North America, and the opportunities continued to soar for me. By then the girls were in high school and Chris just started grade school. By 1986 Anne and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, Sandy was married and had her first child, Alesia. Karen was out on her own, Chris was nine, and my career at Fuchs was blossoming. A year later Karen was married and living in Florida, and she and Sandy each had a son. In July ’87 Karen had Mack, and by December Sandy had Trent, but her marriage was falling apart, and soon after she became a single Mom raising the two infants. Fortunately we had converted the second floor of our large home into an apartment, and Sandy was able to stay there for a while with the children.
By this time Anne and I had become dedicated swim parents by signing Chris with the Rowan Aquatic Club swim team. Swimming consumed the three of us for the next ten years – Chris in the pool for hours at a time, and Anne and I working what seemed like a second job with the team duties. In addition, there were weekend meets to attend quite often. When Chris was ready for high school we were able to get him into Salisbury High School, which was the only school in the county that had a high school swim team at that time. By the time Chris graduated, all five of the county high schools had swim teams, thanks largely to the influence of the Rowan Aquatic Club YMCA swim team.
By the mid-nineties our lives were beginning to settle down. Anne and I often discussed retiring in the Salisbury area where we had become quite comfortable. The only stipulation she gave me was that I was not allowed to stop working until I was 70 years old because she didn’t want me hanging around the house “driving her crazy” during the day! We eventually sold the Spencer house, which had become too big for just the two of us, and moved into a cute two-bedroom house on Rowan Mill Road that we bought from Sandy. Chris was a freshman at UNC Wilmington, but he dropped out after the first year. Sandy had married Gary Fite. Gary’s brother Frank, who had served in the Coast Guard, convinced Chris to join the Coast Guard, which he did in August 1998.
July 8, 1999 – five days after my 60th birthday, my job at Fuchs was eliminated. A larger conglomerate that planned to move the operation to their Pittsburgh facility had absorbed the company. Within a few months I had a new job at Technosteel in Darlington, SC. Six months later the parent company, Aluminum Ladder Company of Florence, SC, decided to disband Technosteel, but they transferred me to the Florence office in a new capacity as a design engineer, which was a new career for me. I was given the opportunity to specialize in custom designing safe access fall protection equipment primarily for the transportation industry, although a lot of the projects were related to other industries. Our lives were on a new track.
However, Anne’s health had been on a steady decline. She was on about ten different medications for various conditions. In an attempt to improve her circulation she opted for a relatively simple and safe cardiovascular procedure to have stents inserted in her arteries. During the procedure some plaque loosened and sliced through her aorta. Emergency surgery repaired the cut, but her heart was too weak to take the shock, and on August 27th at 2:30 in the morning she passed away.
A year later I retired from Aluminum Ladder and moved to Venice, Florida to be nearer daughter Karen and her family, whom we hadn’t seen much of during the previous twenty years. After two years in Venice, I decided I wanted to spend more time with Chris and his young family in Hampton, Virginia. I wanted to be part of three-year-old Jasmine’s growing up process, so I made the move. By then Chris had been in the Coast Guard for seven years and had been married to Karen, whom he met while both attended Coast Guard school in California.
That brings us to the present. After ten years of service in the Coast Guard, Chris and Karen decided on a whim to have Chris finish his ten years and they would move to Orlando, Florida. Everything fell into place like clockwork, and in the summer of 2008 they made the move to Orlando. I followed right along, and currently live four miles and six minutes from them. We’re all three miles from Disney World, and we can see the fireworks at the Magic Kingdom every night from their condo and from my apartment complex. Life is good, and getting better.
This is a photo of Chris, Karen, and Jasmine, and I'm in the red shirt. As holders of annual passes to Universal Studios, here we were relaxing outside of Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville Restaurant at Universal's Citiwalk in the summer of '08.
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