Fighting Forties

By the time Japan invaded Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Nelson family had been completed with the addition of Howard Lawrence on April 26th of that same year. Bob was almost twenty, and he tried in vain several times to join the Army. It was his asthma that kept him out of military service. Although he did not graduate from Brooklyn Tech, his technical training got him a job with Sperry Gyroscope located at Bush Terminal on 39th Street. Warren, almost eighteen, had also not finished Tech, but he too started work at Sperry. Dick just turned fifteen and was still in high school at the New York School of Printing. Allen just started his freshman year at High School of Aviation in Long Island City, Queens. Marilyn was three and Gene fifteen months.

The US and the Nelsons each had a full plate before them. After the United States declared war on Japan, it was Germany who declared war on the United States because Germany was allied with Japan. Bernie was able to use his recent truck driving experiences to secure a civilian job with the Army Transportation Corps at the bustling Brooklyn Army Base, which had been gearing up as the primary point of dispatching materiel to the troops in Europe during the war. During the time he worked there, Bernie was awarded an extra weeks pay several times for suggestions he submitted for improving methods and procedures as part of the ongoing incentive program at the base.

Here is a significant photo taken in March 1942 of the oldest Nelson sibling, Bob, age twenty, holding the youngest Nelson sibling, Howie, almost one year old. A short while later Bob married Dotsy Murphy, the second or third oldest child from the Murphy apartment across the hall from the Nelson apartment at 347-56th Street. Bob and Dot began their new life together at an apartment somewhere around 46th Street and 6th Avenue.

The Fausts and Andersons were still living at 343-56th Street. One summer day in ’41 Gray Faust drove his 1929 Ford home and was about to park it at the curb in front of the apartment where two-year-old Gene was sitting at the curb. Gray stopped the car, got out, and carried Gene to safety on the top step of the apartment. When he got back in the car he didn’t see Gene run back to the curb. In the meantime, Gray proceeded to park the car, unaware that Gene is sitting at the curb. The car wheel smashed Gene’s knee against the curb, and for the next six months his leg was in a cast. His name means “well-born,” and that rings true because he never suffered any more than a few ugly scars from the incident.

In January of ’43 Dotsy gave birth to the first Nelson grandchild, young Bob. By the time Warren married Louise Roi in June, the Nelson family made its big move up the street to 367-56th Street, where they would remain for the next twenty years. It was while Warren and Louise were living with the rest of the family at that address when Warren received his “invitation” from Uncle Sam in 1944. In the meantime, seventeen-year-old Dick was sweet on Patricia Shoaf, who lived with her family at 347, second floor right, above the Nelsons’ former apartment. Dick split his time between baseball and his sweetheart. He left high school before graduating, and started a job working at a popular local bakery on 4th Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets. He tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and received an invitation to their spring training camp in Vero Beach, Florida. Dick was torn between spending his money on a chance trip to Vero Beach or save it to marry Patricia. He chose the latter.

Warren was drafted in 1944, and after the required training was sent to the European theatre on the Queen Mary, which was converted to a troop ship during the war. His experiences suffered during the Battle of the Bulge haunted him for decades, and until his passing in January 2009 he was still receiving counseling as a result of those experiences. After VE day in May 1945 Warren was sent home in anticipation of being deployed to Japan, but that never happened. In the meantime Dick received his “invitation” from Uncle Sam, and while on a troop ship in the Pacific late in the summer of 1945, he and his fellow soldiers received word that the Japanese had surrendered, and that they would be part of the occupation forces in Japan.

In April 1945 Dot presented Bob with their second son, Tom. In the autumn of 1946 Louise presented Warren with their first and only child, Kenneth. Bob and Dot moved into the apartment vacated by the Shoafs, who moved elsewhere, and Warren and Louise moved to the 46th Street and 6th Avenue area. Dick came home from Japan sometime in 1946, and in 1947 he married his sweetheart Pat. They began their new life together across the street from Bernie and Jennie’s tenement, in the apartment house at 374-56th Street, located on the corner of 4th Avenue and 56th Street.

By 1947 the American economy was booming. That December also produced the worst snowstorm the city of New York had ever seen (that is until February 2006). Bernie found his last job at Kenway Metals on 3rd Street in Brooklyn dispatching trucks of assorted metal products to various industries around the NY-NJ metropolitan area. Dick began a long career with Schraffts. Warren was working with the NYC transportation system as a trolley driver, and then as a bus driver when the city made the conversion to buses. Marilyn, Gene, and Howie were all attending PS140A at 59th Street, which used to be PS 118 when the four older boys attended grade school. Dick and Pat began a long history of church affiliation by attending South Reformed Church, and then influenced the rest of the family to participate, especially the three younger Nelson children.

In September 1948 Bob and Dot presented Bernie and Jennie with their first granddaughter, Lynda, who was the last of the Nelsons born in the forties.

Here is your link to the happenings in the rest of the US during the forties.