Today's Featured Biography

 
Robert Nelson

Here's a photo from the October 10, 2009 Reunion Event. I think Leslie Bowman Marcus took it, and I'm standing next to Sylvia (Cartwright) Simpson. Below that are pictures of me and Sylvia from our 2nd Grade class picture at Crocker Highlands school in Oakland, recorded about 50 years earlier:




Oakland is the hometown I specify, because that's where I was born and lived until age 14. That was when my mother and father moved the family to Piedmont, where various of my relatives maintained a presence from 1925 until I was the last to leave in 1998. I closed the sale of my mother's house without assistance from a realtor to my great relief and satisfaction. This was a couple of years after she passed away. I was the executor of her estate. Everybody involved in the probate remains on reasonably good terms to this day... Although I can't claim all or even most of the credit for this accomplishment, it still brings a lot of satisfaction and was well worth considerable sacrifice.

Canyon is where I claim residence, but it's really only the place I pick up my mail. (Now retired) federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel had no problem recognizing my legal residency in Canyon, though, when she ushered me into a standard 18 month non-voluntary term as a grand juror a few years ago. I successfully completed that service with an Honorable Discharge. Our grand jury earned distinction as having the lowest attrition rate of any that the corps of federal prosecutors could remember. We only needed 3 alternates to replace the original 23 jurors...

I'm a licensed mechanical engineer and contractor. In the summer of 1997 I ended up with the job of installing the air conditioning for the Piedmont High School library building remodel job. They enclosed the former Quad area with the new library and some new classrooms. The PHS administration did not make any effort to secure the archives of old Clan-O-Log yearbooks, and they were open and accessible to the jobsite, almost as if they were waste paper and trash! I did my best to protect them... I impressed some of the other construction workers by opening up the 1969 volume and showing them my picture! :-)

I returned in May 2009 to the PHS Library to photograph class pictures from the 1967 and 1968 Clan-O-Logs, garnering some Yearbook Photos missing from the 1969 volume, which is the only one I have (besides the 8th Grade Clan-O-Log from 1965). A few pictures of the new PHS Library are on the Class Message Board from that visit...

The video at the top of my profile is a short "sample" exhibition of classmate Christina Hope Shepherd's (Tina Smith) unique underwater graphic art that we worked on back in 2009 before the 40th Reunion. Sadly, as of this profile revision, she has passed on...

Here is a music video from the Jefferson Airplane, their song "It's No Secret" written by Marty Balin who just passed on within the past few days of this profile revision. It is hard to keep anything secret these days when there is little privacy, but I think that's generally a good thing! One line from the song has 20-something Balin shouting out that "as I get older the years they get heavy for you"... I am pleased to report that having cruised happily through much of my 60s, the years aren't really heavy for me yet! :-)



Finally, if you have a couple of more minutes, I'd like to share part of a Soviet movie that was directed by a veteran of the WWII 588th Night Bomber Regiment. This group of military aviators was known by their Nazi enemies as the "Night Witches", because they attacked under cover of darkness in obsolete, unprotected wooden biplanes. All members of the regiment were young women. These biplanes were highly maneuverable and had a top speed slower than the stall speed of Nazi fighter planes, so they were hard to shoot down. In this clip, the crew evades a Nazi fighter, then performs a daring rescue... The director of the movie was one of about two dozen veterans of the "Night Witches" to receive Hero Of The Soviet Union, comparable to the Congressional Medal of Honor for USA military... Here is some information about the director, then on to the movie clip, which is over after a couple of minutes (unless you want to watch the movie for another hour until it ends!)...





I share this because of a long term interest I've maintained in former "Iron Curtain" countries. In this age of worldwide social networking, I have been able to get acquainted with some people in the Russian Federation... They refer to WWII as "The Great Patriotic War", and even today its events are significant and well remembered due to the huge sacrifices made for their hard-won victory. The video clip illustrates a couple of Russian stereotypes that probably carry a lot of truth. Intelligence and capability of the Russian people, including women, and also the willingness to go out of their way to halp others... I think it's better to cultivate friendship with such people than to maintain a hostile, adversarial relationship...

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