CV-Youth and Education

This is my CV. Since I am not looking for work, it is somewhat different that other bare bones CVs. This CV covers my jobs as a youth and my education.

My First Job:

The first job that I remember was babysitting for two little girls, Jean and Joan Prosser. They lived in our block in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I loved this job and when the Prossers called I would almost start salivating in anticipation. Why? Because the Prossers had a complete set of encyclopedias and when I babysat all I would do is read the encyclopedia. The girls were asleep when I babysat and never woke up. It was a dream job for me.

My second job was as a newspaper boy for the Minneapolis Tribune. We had just started Junior High School when one of my classmates, Jim Schefter, said "Anyone want a newspaper route." I told him "Yes" and the next thing I knew I was delivering the Minneapolis Tribune (what a great paper) to my route in Grand Forks. I have many happy memories of this job where I would get up at 6:00 a.m. and deliver papers on my bicycle. In the winter I would ride my bicycle until I had fallen three times off my bicycle (ice, snow, North Dakota) and then I would know it was time to give up the bicycle and walk.

The Tribune was my favorite paper to read. It used to have a question column every day where a citizen was asked at random what he or she thought of something. One time the reporter asked a person what she thought of Daylight Savings Time (Daylight Savings Time having just been started) and she said she didn't like it "Because the extra hour of sunlight was turning her grass brown." The Tribune also had a "day brightener," a little joke. Some of my favorite brighteners were:

Question: What happens after you drink an Elvis Cocktail?

Answer: Your side burns.

Question: What are the two favorite songs of the Salami Stuffers' Union?

Answer: 16 Tums and Heartburn Hotel.

The Classifieds in the Tribune always had a heading for "Airplanes for Sale." I used to love to read about the planes for sale dreaming that I would someday have a plane.

When I was in eighth grade, I began delivering the Grand Forks Herald, the local morning paper. My route was mostly on Reeves Drive, the ritziest street in Grand Forks where most of the grand poobahs lived at the time. It was nice to deliver papers to well-off people and I was especially rewarded at Christmas time. I had 51 customers and my Christmas tips one year were over $100. I especially remember one of my customers, Abe Abrahamson, coming out of his house at 6:30 a.m. to give me a Christmas tip.

It was so cold in Grand Forks in the winter that many of my memories of my GF Herald route involved freezing my feet and hands. My dad gave me some sheepskin lined moccasins to wear inside my overshoes, but they didn't prevent my feet from freezing. The snow was always high but instead of using the sidewalk to deliver papers, I just made a path across people's lawns to get to the next house. It was easier than going back to the sidewalk which, given the size of the yards of these grand manses, was usually a long distance.

One memory especially sticks with me, probably because of guilt. I was in the habit of throwing folded newspapers from the sidewalk to the doorstep when I could. When I got to Ed Boe's house, I threw his paper but threw it a little high. Lo and behold, It broke one of Mr. Boe's porch windows. Thinking quickly, I retrieved the paper from inside the porch and put it down on the other side of the outside porch steps on the lowest step. Then I made an iceball and threw it through the broken window. I thought I was clever and no one ever complained but I knew that I was wrong.

Another time I was delivering papers when I found a turtle on Dr. Fritzell's lawn. It was alive but part of its top shell was missing. I thought it had been shot and didn't know what to do so I took it down to the river (about two blocks away) and let it go on the riverbank. I often think of that poor turtle.

When I was in ninth grade, I took over a GF Herald evening paper route on Belmont Road, a busy street in Grand Forks. The route was only nine blocks long and I had 102 customers. It was great but, as time went by, I no longer wanted a paper route. The problem was that a lot of girls from my class walked home from school on Belmont Road and I didn't want them to see me delivering papers. I used to hide in side yards and behind trees when I saw them coming. For this very good reason, I ended my paperboy career.

My next job the summer after my sophomore year in high school was working as a dishwasher at the Student Union at the University of North Dakota. I also worked there during the summer after my junior year. Most of the time we had the dishwashing set up this way: My friends Jim Schefter and Neil Hensrud and I took the food trays out of the windows where people returned trays and we dumped the leftover food and napkins into a trash can. Then, Huey, a fine gentleman who worked there, rinsed the dishes and silver, stacked them in a carrier bin and sent it through the dishwasher on a conveyer belt. At the other end of the dishwasher my cousin Arnie awaited the washed dishes. They were always hot as hell and, since we never figured out that we should wear gloves, there was a lot of "ow, ow, ow" when he stacked the cleaned dishes from the dishwasher.

I was lucky and often was chosen to wash the pots and pans after the dishwashing was completed. This meant extra pay for me and I loved it.

It was during this time that we developed the peculiar language known as Goose Latin. In order to speak it, you had to add the letters "ib" (pronounced "eib" as in Earl Sheib) after the first letter of each syllable (or before the first letter when it was a vowel) when speaking. We could all speak it and could communicate fluently in it. Our own secret language. When Jane Quale, the homecoming queen of our school left her food tray in the window, we said: "wibow! Ibits Jibane Quibalibe's plibate!" and Jane didn't understand a word that we said.

When I graduated from Grand Forks Central High School in June 1958 my parents gave me a clock radio and put me on a train to Minneapolis. I went to the Central YMCA and then reported to my job at Bridgeman Creameries. My job was to wash 5 gallon ice cream cans in a little room with only two sinks and a little window that was too high to see out of (except for the sky). I loved this job. I refused to wear gloves since I wanted to work as fast as possible, so my hands would be all cut up by little strings of metal which came out of the ice cream cans. I can remember that my hands would heal during the weekend but after I worked a while on Monday, they would hurt like hell.

I washed ice cream cans too fast so they had to find other things for me to do. My favorite other jobs there were:: (1) rolling turkey rolls (I rolled the ice cream rolls in a tray of nuts to so that the nuts adhered to the rolls and then I wrapped the rolls in cellophane); (2) going to the freezer and filling popsicle and novelty orders for the stores (it was zero degrees in there and I was all alone in a freezer); (3) filling 1 gallon jars with dark cherries from a 55 gallon drum (Floyd Barnes and I would each eat a gallon of dark cherries while we were doing this job); helping unload the sugar truck (the sugar bags weighed 100 lbs. each and I weighed 110 lbs); and, last but not least, eating ice cream. I loved Minneapolis (my first big city) and walked everywhere.

When I started my freshman year at the University of North Dakota (UND), I worked at night in the serving line of the cafeteria. Dennis Herron served up the meat course and the mashed potatoes and I served the vegetables and soups. (I remember that people would ask me what the vegetable was and I would say "carrots and peas combined." Mrs. Ruud, my boss, suggested that I say "mixed carrots and peas" and I complied. I loved working with Dennis. My friend, George Georgacus, often served the ice cream down the line and he taught me a Greek phrase which I have often used: "Fie skata, pusda." Luckily, the persons I have used this invective against don't know Greek.

After my freshman year, I went back to Minneapolis to wash ice cream cans. Bridgeman Creameries had installed a machine to make it easier to wash the cans so my work was easier. I got a pleasant surprise that year because the Teamster Union rules required that my salary be doubled to a princely $2.30 per hour.

I did not stay at the YMCA for very long that summer because, while I was on the pay phone to my mother, a strange man came and put his arm around me and cooed some sweet things to me. I was frightened (having no experience of this sort before) and moved to a former mansion north of Loring Park. There were 52 tenants living there and we got our room and two meals a day for $14/week. I had three roommates: (1) George Hirvala, a railroad worker from Hibbing, MN and a friend of Bob Zimmerman's (Dylan's); (2) a music teacher from Iowa who convinced me to buy a clarinet because I could learn to play one (in fact, I learned to play several songs and, later, two of my daughters played the same clarinet in their high school bands); and, Bernie, an epileptic man from northern Minnesota (I say "epileptic" because I learned so much from him about his epilepsy and the problems he had from it). There was also a man in one of the rooms who was a quadriplegic and I used to take him out for his haircuts. I learned a lot from him too.

They had big poker games in this house and every week I watched Matt Murkovich, a high steel worker, lose his weekly paycheck.

I spent a lot of time listening to my clock radio and that's why I know every song from the top 40 in that era by heart.

My sophomore year I worked in the cafeteria serving line and also helped out in the snack bar making sandwiches and waiting on people. I was the only one who wanted to clean the malted milk machine at the end of the day so Susie, the snack bar manager, appreciated me. I loved making sandwiches. I hated making ice cream sodas because I could never figure out how much ice cream to add without making the soda spill over. Also, I worked banquets in the Student Union. This was a great experience. Mrs. Starcher, the wife of the University President, specifically asked for me to wait on her table. I loved being a waiter, especially at small banquets where I would often find a tip for me under a plate (one time I got $20).

I worked the summer after my sophomore year at Bridgeman's again. This was the year that I read Thomas a Kempis's "The Imitation of Christ" and I decided to imitate Christ. This means that I didn't change clothes for about 10 weeks and that I tried not to have any bad thoughts. It was a good try.

My junior year I again worked in the cafeteria and helped out with banquets and with late hours dishwashing.

At the end of my junior year I went to ROTC summer camp at Fort Lewis, WA for 6 weeks training. My friend Ordeen Flom and I drove there in his car, a Kharman Ghia (wow, what a car that was!) I did not like summer camp and felt out of sorts there. Luckily my friend Dick Elofson was in my company and on the other floor of my barracks. I had a lot of difficulty dealing with summer camp but admired my company commander, Captain Foreman. He had the habit of holding a bar of the baggage holder above his head on the bus and I still emulate this habit out of admiration for him.

I lived in fear of my name being called for anything. Since I started college I had not been able to recite in class out of a shyness which I did not comprehend. Anyway, toward the end of summer camp my name was called and I was told to set up defensive positions on the present terrain to counter an expected attack by tank and infantry forces across a stream in front of us. I said (in a quavering voice) that I would set the machine guns, the trenches and the bazookas about 100 yards from the stream. There were groans from my peers but, at the end of my presentation, Captain Foreman said: "That is exactly right, Nelson." and the groans subsided. Later, he told me that he had his doubts about me, but my presentation had allayed his doubts.

I was the only man in my company to not qualify on the rifle range. When I did not qualify after two tries, I was sent out to try to qualify again along with men from other companies who had not qualified the first and second times (and there were very few of us). This third time we were to keep our own scores. I still did not qualify.

I was duty officer in the dayroom that night when our company sergeant came by and chastised me for not qualifying since this meant that the men in my barracks could not get weekend leave. He said "Why didn't you do what the others did?" and I said "What's That?" He said "Lie!"

After ROTC summer camp, my friend Dick Elofson and I (he's the friend who was in the same company as me) got a ride to Montana and decided to go to Denver. We got a bus and rode to Denver. I got a job at McGinty's Bar and Grill as a busboy and, after a month, got a ride back to Grand Forks.

I then worked for Sandstom and Olson, a construction company, for a month and told my dad and mom that I was going to transfer to the University of Washington. My dad was against this but he did get me a ride to Seattle.

In Seattle I applied for a job at the Husky Union Building (HUB), the student union at the University of Washington. I got a job at the candy counter where we also sold newspapers, cigars and cigarettes. My boss, Sylvia Parsons, was a great person but she didn't know that, after she left, I used to steal peanuts, cigarettes and candy. I had to do this because I was so impoverished. I restricted myself to one meal a day (a Huskyburger or a can of chili from a machine) and used the cigarettes to allay hunger pangs. I had to use my money to pay my tuition. I worked about 30 hours per week.

I received a big surprise when I attended my first German class at the U of W. The instructor was speaking in German, a language I did not understand even though I had three years of German at the University of North Dakota and German was my major. At UND no one spoke German in class except for memorized conversations in a conversation class. I was taken aback because I couldn't understand the professors at the U of W so I started cutting my German classes.

I remember a conversation that I had with my German Grammar professor. I said "If I take the final, will you give me an 'F'?" She said "No, I'll give you a 'D'." Needless to say, since I needed a "B" average in my German major, I was unable to graduate at the end of my senior year.

After my senior year, I started taking some summer classes at the U of W but dropped out. Instead of working, I started to read. I read a book a day for 90 days starting with Plato's "Meno" and Gorgaeus" and ending with John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Liberal Hour." It was a great summer even when I had to spend an 18-hour day reading Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks."

I went back to Grand Forks for a short time and then (due to poverty) hopped a freight from Minot, North Dakota to go to Seattle. My brother-in-law dropped me off at the freight yard and when I saw a train going west, I hopped on. Not a good idea, because the car was a coal gondola car and I couldn't see sleeping on top of a pile of coal. Luckily, a railroad cop saw me and asked where I was going. I said I was a student at the U of W and he asked for my student ID. Then he said "third track over, leaves in 1/2 hour, there'll be a car open for you." I followed his instructions. I am eternally grateful to him.

Three hobos jumped in the car I was in when we got to Beach, North Dakota. They showed me how to wrap up in feed bags so I didn't freeze when we went over the Continental Divide. They all carried knives and drank their hooch out of peanut butter jars.

Dr. Frank Jones, Chairman of the Comparative Literature Department, told me that I could graduate in two quarters by taking comparative literature courses. I managed to do so by the skin of my teeth (same old problem: working too hard, unable to study). Thanks to him I took some great courses: Victorian Poetry (hence my love of Tennyson and Arnold); Icelandic Sagas; Racine and Moliere in Literature; Utopian Literature; Writings of James Joyce; and, Nineteenth Century American Literature, among others.

The first quarter of my fifth year, I roomed with my friend Morley Glicken. Morley took the main room and I took the closet-sized room next to it. I would have to go through Morley's room to get to the bathroom, so I would pee into milk cartons and throw them out the window when I had to go at night. Money was a terrible problem so I decided to live on those frozen Pillsbury Doughboy biscuits that you can buy at any store. After the third day of eating only biscuits (about 20 a day I got a terrible diarrhea so I had to go off that diet.

I got one lucky break when I had to start a fifth year of college. During my senior year our ROTC professor had asked "How many of you have taken Trigonometry?" I and a few others raised our hands and were immediately assigned to the Artillery Corps and told we would get orders to report to Fort Bliss, Oklahoma after graduation.

Here's the lucky break: during my fifth year I signed up to be interviewed to enter Army Intelligence. I passed the oral and written exam and was told that after graduation I would take Infantry basic training and then go to the Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, MD.

I met two great friends at the U of W: Vic Ruryk of Calgary, Alberta and Vishan Taliwala of Bombay, India. Later, Vishan visited me on Long Island with his stunning blonde girlfriend.

I graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature in March 1963 and reported for duty as a freshly-minted Second Lieutenant at Fort Benning, GA. When I took my physical there, a medical corpsman asked me "Sir, do you want to stay in the Army?" I asked him why he asked and he said "Because you are 12 lbs. under the minimum weight. You are 5'11" tall and weight 113 lbs." I said yes I wanted to stay in the Army so he listed my height as 5'7".

Nine weeks of Infantry training was fun. I enjoyed it even when I inadvertently called in a mock mortar barrage on my own position.

I especially enjoyed the Escape and Evasion course. We all had to crawl through gravel under barbed wire for a half mile while machine guns firing just over our head. We wore modess pads or sponges taped to our knees and elbows. Even though the machine guns were supposedly firing just over our heads, we would run in a half-crouch when the searchlights were turned out.

We also were dropped off by helicopter (simulated by trucks since all the copters were in Vietnam) and forced in the dead of night to find our way 7 miles back to a place called Lightning Road. In order to get there we had to cross Thunder Road and Yankee Road, both of which were patrolled by aggressor troops (gung ho enlisted men dying to catch an officer out). Several of the men who started the course with me were caught. When caught, they were brought to a stockade full of pigs. The stockade had a greased pole in the center and those who climbed the greased pole were released.

Meany, the man from New York who was with me, and I walked about a mile toward Lightning Road and then dropped to the ground and covered ourselves with our ponchos so we could smoke without our cigarettes being seen. We got lost in the Fort Benning landscape but ran into a Vietnamese classmate and he led us all the way to Lightning Road.

The martial arts training at Fort Benning changed me. Before I was a real physical coward and after I felt that I could handle myself. Being slammed to the ground 20 times and slamming others to the ground the same number of times can bring a revelation.

Next was Fort Holabird, MD for 16 weeks training at the Intelligence School. This was easy for me and I did well. While I was there I signed up for the Defense Language Institute (formerly the Army Language School) in Monterey, CA. I wanted to take 13 weeks of French but they wanted to assign me for 12 months of Urdu (the language of Western Pakistan). I declined.

Before we graduated, I was asked where I wanted to be assigned and I told them "Anywhere but New Jersey." I was then told I was assigned to Garden City and I assumed this was in New Jersey, the "Garden State." When I objected, they told me that Garden City was on Long Island and this was a plum assignment.

In Garden City I was a Special Agent with the Counter-Intelligence Corps. Most of our work was routine: background investigations to determine a person's LIDMAC (loyalty, integrity, discretion, morality and character).

The most fun we had in Garden City was when Intelligence School classes were sent up to Long Island and told they had just entered East Germany. They were given specific intelligence assignments (e.g., photograph the planes taking off from Grumman Field). We were the East German Secret Police and we made the most of it. We broke down doors, searched rooms, conducted interrogations and used all kinds of ruses. In fact, I am in an Army Intelligence film: I am the man in the trenchcoat standing by the mailbox.

An amusing incident occurred when PFC Scott Prescott was assigned to my office. He had been polygraphed at the Intelligence School and asked whether he was a homosexual and he asked us if we knew the reason. I told him that I had done his background investigation and, after checking with Hofstra University, had found that he had been excused from gym class during his senior year. He told me "I had a broken arm!" We laughed about it.

During my last six months on Long Island I was the Special Agent in Charge of our office. We had 13 agents. I was surprised that I was chosen since my employee ratings (Efficiency Reports) were not that good and I hated the Army.

Toward the end of my tour of duty, I said to my wife that I didn't know what to do after the Army since I didn't foresee writing a thesis on Beowolf. She said "you like to argue, you should go to law school."

I began law school at the University of North Dakota in the Fall of 1965 but couldn't hack it. I still lacked self esteem and couldn't study. In law school a student is required to brief cases, i.e., give a brief synopsis of the facts of the case, the legal issues involved and the resolution of those issues. I could not do this. I went to the Dean of the Law School and told him I was dropping out. He said "You should think of coming back. You would be a good lawyer." I thanked him but remembered what he said. His name was Jerrold Walden and I have never forgotten him and have immense admiration for him.

The second semester of that year, after psychological counseling (I think there were three sessions) I enrolled in undergraduate courses to become a high school teacher. One of the courses that I took, Introduction to Economics, was taught by the Chairman of the Economics Department. He told me toward the end of the course that if I majored in Economics he could assure me of a Teaching Assistant position the following year. I thanked him and began thinking that maybe I would go back to law school.

The next year I re-enrolled in law school My problem regarding recitation in class continued. When I was called on I saw a flash of blue light in front of my eyes (literally) and could not respond. Since those who don't respond adequately are thrown out of class, I was thrown out of class three times and cut quite a few classes. I didn't know what was wrong with me and my self esteem would have been rock bottom except for the fact I spent a lot of time with my classmates over coffee at the student union and realized that I was up with them.

I did very well in law school although I was unable to study and although I cut most of my classes in my second and third years.

I was interviewed by a U.S. Department of Justice interviewer and got a call saying that I could work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Chicago or New York We started talking about how great California was and, especially, San Francisco. When he called me back, he told me I had been assigned to the San Francisco Office.

Since I had to be in the top 10% of my class to qualify for this position, my wife and I were concerned about my grades. During my senior year, my wife was out sweeping the sidewalk when she happened to meet our next-door neighbor, my Civil Procedure Professor. She asked him how I had done in the class and he said "He got a "B" in the final but I had to give him a "D" because he never came to class." My wife started chasing him with a broom yelling "You Bastard!" and he ran saying "I had to do it, I had to do it." I got the job in San Francisco anyway.

Later on, I wrote to one of my former professors asking for a recommendation and he wrote: "Of course I remember you or rather your empty chair. Your absence left quite an hiatus in my class."

What was I like in law school: In our class picture I am the only one in a beard and a Nehru jacket. I could not get a job with the North Dakota Supreme Court as a Law Clerk despite my academic ability. In brief, I was a troublemaker.

At one time the Contracts Professor, a wonderful man, left a note on the bulletin board to three of us (John Demco, Ted Abe and me) saying that we could not continue to cut his class or there would be consequences. I asked Ted to send the Contracts Professor's wife a dozen roses on our behalf and he did so. Two days later when we looked at the bulletin board there was a card from the wife to us. It said "Thank you for the flowers, boys." We never did have any problem with the Contracts Professor again although we seldom went to class.

In San Francisco I was working for the INS as a General Attorney - Nationality. You can read about this and my subsequent work history in my CV - Adult, another page on this website.

I now had my BA and JD. I passed the ND Bar Exam in July 1969 and the California Bar Exam in June 1970. Later, in 1983 I took the Washington Bar Exam and passed it.

In 1977 and 1978 I earned 30 credits toward a Masters In Public Administration Degree from the University of North Dakota. Unfortunately, I never wrote the long paper in lieu of thesis that I was required to write for the degree. By this time I was comfortable enough in class to invite the professors to join us in a game of Trivial Pursuit at a local Bistro.