For Christmas my dad's cousin – who in the interest of simplicity I call my uncle - gave me a couple letters my grandfather had written him in the 80s. The original envelopes and writing paper are yellowing, but Dave Nelson's scrawl is still clear. It takes a little bit of imagining to hear his voice while I read the correspondence since he died when I was little and only have the imitations performed by other family to go on when remembering him. At least pictures have preserved his distinct image for me: dark green wayfarer sunglasses, plaid flannel, the constant hint of a smirk at the corners of his mouth.
His voice is inaudible through his words but his character has been illuminated; another uncle – by dad's brother - passed along a collection of letters and poems he had also written, and the beginnings of a memoir that was never finished.
Dave Nelson's wit was sharp and his vocabulary broad; his best education having been a Seabee in World War II and growing up poor in the Depression. (As he noted, he's not sure what's with the "Great" qualifier: "there was nothing great about it.") His life experience makes his commentary more valid than some Ivy League-educated pundit hack's.
Indeed, Dave did not shy from opining.
In one page of his brief autobiography, he has some choice thoughts on Franklin D. Roosevelt, and substituted his own acronyms for many of the Alphabet Soup programs that composed the New Deal, like Whistle, Piss, and Argue instead of the Works Progress Administration. "The stupidity out of Washington surpasses all understanding to this day," he wrote on a particularly ineffective shovel-ready project in Racine, which he called Little Moscow.
When recounting stories of winds and flooding causing erosion in the dust bowl, he took the opportunity to lay into the power elite: "Today there is a different kind of erosion, flood, and wind. It's in our banking industry, government, savings and loans and courts. Billions upon billions of dollars are being sucked by legions of fat money hungry swine driving this nation into a coming financial dust bowl that will be the end of this nation." He wrote that 15 years ago; in some ways he was a prophet.
While not dripping with inflated erudition, his words are simple and direct, far more understandable than some of the writing concocted by policy wonk wannabes developing in the Poli Sci department. My dad has suggested that given the opportunity, Dave would've been a writer, and with the appropriate stylebook at his side he surely could have been.
His stories were gritty, vivid, and coarse, about having to wrangle farm animals, haul buckets of coals for the house stove, fight off bullies, and deal with misbehaving drunks. I know people who moan about doing laundry and loading their dishwashers, about not having the money for rent and bills when they blow hundreds a month on booze.
Dave Nelson dealt with problems heavier than most college students dare to dream of. He was smart but not educated, self-taught and observant. Today too many students rely on a professor's scrawls at the whiteboard or reading assignments before taking the initiative to learn on their own. Meanwhile, they blow money on novelties, then complain about being broke; they whine about a lousy job market but don't have anything particularly special on their résumés that make them marketable.
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