93 year-old WWII vet taught in Wakefield, Massachusetts for 30 years

The school calendar is so engrained in most of us that the arrival of September each year invariably evokes memories our own school days. It may only be a passing memory of a classroom, a classmate or a favorite teacher.

I took things a step further this year and decided to look up my 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Russell Nelson.

Mr. Nelson was born in 1916. He is a veteran of World War II and he taught in Wakefield (MA) public schools for over 30 years. He’s 93 years old, and I quickly realized that I was in the presence of the same sharp wit and playful sense of humor that I remembered from his classroom at Wakefield Junior High School in 1964.

“I was a pupil of yours?” he teased on the phone after I identified myself as a former student. He said he’d be happy to talk to me and invited me to come right over.

We sat at the kitchen table of the home on Chapman Rd. that he and his late wife Priscilla bought in 1950 for $10,400.

“The yard goes back to what we used to call ‘the swamp,’ Nelson says. “But don’t call it ‘the swamp’ now,” he warns with a chuckle. “It’s now called ‘Heron Pond.’ That place has gone up in class – and it’s gone up in price.”

Nelson grew up poor in Essex, Massachusetts. “Poverty attended my early years,” Nelson recalled. “My mother and father had eight children. They couldn’t afford that many. We didn’t have electricity and we didn’t have an indoor toilet.”

Because it was economical, he recalls that beef stew was a staple of the Nelson dinner table, “without much beef, and cheap cuts.”

After high school, Nelson was able to attend a year of college in Pomona, California, thanks to the good graces of his church minister. He came back, met Priscilla, got married and that was the end of college – for the time being.

He worked as a machinist until the war came and he entered the army. He received tank training at Fort Knox and became “a pretty good tank man.” As the war shifted largely to the Pacific, Nelson spent two years in the war zone and saw action in at least four or five battles.

He was part of the amphibious tank assault that was instrumental in taking the island of Leyte in the Philippines. He recalled his amphibious tank unit approaching the beach amid huge waves washing in and out.

“You go up on the beach, a big wave catches you and you make another try.” Nelson explained, adding that if your tank got turned sideways, the waves could flip you over. “You go upside-down, everybody dies. As scared as I was in some of the battles, I never was so scared as I was of going down in that tank. I didn’t want to die that way.”

Nelson also saw action at Ie Shima, which he describes as “one nest of trouble. We lost people there.” Ie Shima is where famous newspaper correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by Japanese gunfire. “I’ll bet Ernie Pyle wasn’t 500 yards from us when he died,” Nelson says. After Ie Shima, Nelson saw action at Okinawa.

Following the war, Nelson finished college at Boston University and taught for a year in Connecticut before he was hired in 1950 to teach sixth grade at the Lincoln School in Wakefield. He was the first male to teach at the school.

Asked why he decided to go into teaching he said, “That’s easy – I love children. I always felt that children were ‘numero uno.’”

Nelson and his wife Priscilla raised four children of their own, Joan, Dana, Debbie and Eric, of whom he is quite proud. “They’ve all done well,” he says, noting that all four have master’s degrees and one has a Ph.D. That pleases him, considering that of his parents’ eight children he was the only one to attend college.

At the Lincoln School, he walked into classroom of 40 students. There were no teacher’s aides in those days, he points out. “We didn’t know what a teacher’s aide was,” Nelson says. That class was so rowdy, Nelson recalls, that their previous year’s teacher had a nervous breakdown and consequently the class hadn’t learned much in fifth grade.

“Training those kids to behave was my first chore,” Nelson says. “Teaching them something was the second.” Somehow, he accomplished both. “They gained two years of achievement under my tutelage – and learned to behave.”

Nelson says that his attitude toward teaching and discipline in the classroom was always the same.

“I don’t think I ever raised my voice,” he says. “I believed in fairness and rightness.”

But his successful approach with students earned him the resentment of some of the more old-fashioned teachers at the Lincoln School. They complained to the principal, who in turn approached Nelson.

“Russ, I need to talk to you,” the Principal said. “The other teachers are squawking about you.”

Nelson apologized to the principal, explaining that he was doing the best he could and believed he was making progress with the kids.

The principal interrupted. “I like what you’re doing,” he told Nelson. “Keep it up.”

“That was all I needed,” Nelson recalls. “I had a guy that stood behind me. Not all principals did that.”

After the Lincoln School, Nelson taught at the Atwell Jr. High School and later at the Junior High on Farm St., in the building that is now the High School.

After he’d been teaching for a while, Nelson realized that if he was going to put his own four kids through college, it would require more money than he was earning as a teacher. “Teachers are underpaid,” he stresses.

To supplement his income, he opened the Wakefield Auto School from an office in the Taylor Building at Main and Lincoln streets. He hired four teachers and bought three cars (one standard transmission and two automatic). He estimates that in the 10 years that he ran it, Wakefield Auto School taught well over a thousand people to drive.

The business was successful enough that he was able to buy himself a 25-foot cabin cruiser, which he sailed to Cape Cod and as far north as Portland, Maine.

In addition to his more than three decades as a teacher, Nelson was Wakefield’s very first system-wide School Adjustment Counselor for children below grade 7, serving in that capacity for 12 years.

“I loved teaching and I love children,” Nelson says. “You can make more money doing something else,” he acknowledges, admitting with a twinkle in his eye, “It helps to have nice vacations. We do enjoy those.”

But in all, Nelson’s experience leads him to one conclusion.

“If I came back,” he says, “I’d probably be a teacher again.”

[This story originally appeared in the September 4, 2009 Wakefield Daily Item.]