Paving the Road to Success

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

The Golden Rule

I've always said that I learned my formula for success over the course of my life. This process began at home, and throughout my life, every time I thought of home, I thought about the Golden Rule.

I grew up at 712 N. First Street in Princeton, Illinois, and our family attended St. Matthew's Church. My parents, Malcolm and Frances Nelson, taught me to follow the Golden Rule, which is in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 12. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is the foundation stone on which any good life is built.

It was my stone.

My Dad: Ahead of His Time

Every family has its challenges, and the Nelsons were no exception. My grandfather, Clarence Wilbert Nelson, went to Boone, Iowa, from Sweden. He served in the Spanish-American War as a private in Company H-49 Regiment Iowa and served on the ship the Maine in 1898. Clarence married Emily Augusta Malcolm in 1902 in Henry County, and they had four children—Myrtle, Malcolm, Margaret, and Milo. He farmed a homestead in Woodhull, Illinois, and made a good living on the farm until he experienced a disabling illness or injury when my father was fourteen years old. My dad (Malcolm) was called out of the eighth grade to pick the standing corn in the field and get it stored for the winter. Back then it was all done by hand. That was it. My father never went back to school, because his family needed him.

But his lack of formal education didn't stop him from teaching himself.

Dad was an avid reader, well versed on many subjects, and with an unquenchable curiosity and a definitive mind. If he read it and thought he could use it, it was stored in his brain forever. If it was something mechanical, he couldn't wait to get his hands on it. Dad was innovative even in his teens, tinkering with this and modifying that. He made the family gas-powered tractor more powerful and efficient by drawing vapor from the cooling system and injecting it into the carburetor to increase the horsepower so the field got plowed faster. Talk about being ahead of his time! In the field of aviation, water injection was used in World War II for short bursts of added thrust in energy.

During my younger years, my family visited old friends and relatives at various farms. With all young kids, the game was to find something interesting and keep busy while the old folks talked away the afternoon. I remember one story where a promoter drifted through the countryside selling shares on some "get rich quick" oil speculation. Apparently, Grandpa Nelson bought in, but the results were not so good. Like they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

Greed is a terrible thing.

At that time, my grandmother's family owned a residence in Princeton. And I believe the Nelson family move to Princeton came about because of my grandfather's financial setback.

My Mother's Roots

My mother's life was torn apart when she was three years old. She remembered being hurried out of their residence one evening. Her mother had died unexpectedly of dropsy (better known as edema). Back then they called it a heart attack. Alta Frances Lange and her sisters, Jesse and Minnie, were more than their farmhand father could take care of by himself. Increasingly turning to alcohol to numb his pain, he split Jessie, Minnie, and Alta and sent them to three different relatives. After his children left, he lived in a barn.

Alta later insisted on being called Frances. She went to live with her Aunt Ricka and Uncle Millard Searl on Elm Street in Princeton, Illinois. They owned a horse, cows, and chickens, so they had plenty of beef, milk, and cottage cheese. Uncle Millard hated cheese, and since young Frances wanted to be like him in every way, she grew up hating cheese too.

It was the simple pleasures that Mom enjoyed the most. She pushed her favorite dolls in her special doll buggy. She doted on her pet chicken, which had lost one leg in a mower accident. For hours, she looked at 3-D pictures on the stereoscope. She enjoyed hot baths in a big washtub with the water heated from the stove using coal or dried corncobs. Trips to the grocery store were always an adventure, with carcasses of beef and pork hanging in the back of the store and thick inches of sawdust on the floor to catch the drippings. On a hot summer day, she sucked on the ice chips Ed Hansen would give her from his horse-drawn ice wagon. After Sunday church, she felt like a princess being driven around town in the family's red-tasseled surrey. As much as she enjoyed the family's first Model T Ford, it was the home's conversion to indoor plumbing that Mom remembered as the finest improvement that ever happened in her life.

Like all little girls, Mom wore a dress to school, and her long curls cascaded down her neck. She loved music, and although she never learned to play any instrument, she liked to sing. She also liked arithmetic. In her early school days, Johnny Warfield helped her out with her times tables and helped her make sense of fractions.

My mother would get up at the crack of dawn when the circus came to Princeton. She'd watch the railroad cars unload, and when the Greatest Show on Earth began, she'd have front-row seats. The Bureau County Fair was less glamorous but still a lot of fun. Mom would eat fried chicken and potato salad with her family under a big shade tree before marching off to gorge herself on soda pop and treats from the midway. She also loved visiting the animal barns, admiring the fancy needlework, and studying the home-grown produce and canned goods.

Mom attended Princeton High School and took mostly secretarial classes. Even into her nineties, she could remember the names of her favorite teachers—Maude Cox, Ferris Trimble, Miss Genevieve Ashdown, and Miss Stetson. When the high school building burned down, classes shifted to the Mission Covenant Church, Princeton City Hall, and the post office.

Her after-school and weekend job was at The Chocolate Shop owned by two Greek brothers who scrupulously guarded their secret recipes in the basement. No one was allowed to set foot in the candy-making area except them. Later she worked as a clerk for a dry goods store, where she sold bolts of cloth for people who sewed and made their own clothes at home.

After Mom graduated from Princeton High School in 1926, she continued to attend what was then the English Lutheran Church (currently St. Matthew's Church). She joined the choir and loved to sing. She recalled one family, the Nelsons, who were habitually late. A son named Malcolm worked at Erickson's Greenhouse, and even though he had a good voice, he never joined the choir. However, he was active in the Lutheran League and attended many church activities. That's where my parents met. They were married on Christmas day in 1927. They had six children—Wilbur, Robert, Marilyn, Norma, Ronald, and myself. We went to church every Sunday as a family.

After my parents wed in 1927, my dad switched jobs and went to work for Hade Ford Garage as a mechanic. He was always a Ford man until he switched over to REO when he started his own agency later in life.

Malcolm and Milo: The Early Years

By temperament, my father was suited to be his own boss, and that's when he...