Staff Reports
A memorial service is 2 p.m. Saturday for second generation Carson Valley native William Frederick Nelson, 95. The service will be held on his property located along Highway 395.
Nelson's May 29, 1912, birth was front-page news in The Record-Courier. Nelson died Nov. 30, 2007, at age 95 in the home he built on Douglas Avenue in the 1940s.
Record-Courier Editor Bert Selkirk reported Nelson's birth, saying William Nelson Sr. walked into the Wood-Nelson store in Minden and announced the population of the town had increased by one.
The happy occasion quickly turned to tragedy when Nelson's mother, Carson Valley native Emma Hussman Nelson, died 19 days later at age 23.
Nelson was raised on the ranch belonging to his mother's family.
Family members said he had a deep love and respect for nature and the outdoors. He was an avid rough and ready outdoorsman and dedicated environmentalist long before that became fashionable.
He graduated from Douglas County High School, one of 18 members of the class of 1930. Among his classmates was Brooks Park.
When the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, Nelson enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the age of 29 years old. He served for four years through the end of the war.
When he got out of the service, he and Postmaster Hank Rosenbrock opened the Outdoorsman in downtown Gardnerville in the building Rosenbrock's father built as a shoe store in 1906.
Nelson married high school English teacher Johanna Warren and the couple raised their three children in Gardnerville.
Daughter Kristin Nelson-Hansen wrote that The Outdoorsman was a favorite hang-out for local sportsmen until is closed in the early 1980s.
Nelson-Hansen said that after his retirement Nelson would feed magpies and well into his 80s, he could still be seen shoveling snow, lugging boulders on his land on Highway 395, and cutting firewood in the Pine Nuts.
"In his 90s, his body no longer supported him, but he remained in good spirits and was still out in his favorite restaurants bantering with the locals," she wrote of her father.
Mr. Nelson was preceded in death by his wife Johanna Warren Nelson. He is survived by his three children, Nancy Nelson of Gardnerville, Warren Nelson and daughter Johanna of Berkeley, Calif., and Kristin Nelson-Hansen and husband Steve of Santa Fe, N.M.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in his memory to www.aussiebcrescue.com in the memory of William Frederick Nelson. For information, contact Kathy Givens at 267-4068.
