Childhood:
My parents moved to LA from SLC in 1924, and were married by a Justice
of the Peace in Riverside, CA October 16, 1924. About a year later they
returned to SLC and convinced my mother's parents to sell their home,
quit their jobs and move to LA. The trip to LA was time consuming, circuitous,
fraught with mishap and adventure. They went west from SLC through Winnamucca,
Reno to Sacramento and south to LA. My father had an old Model T Ford
with mechanical problems and oversized tires that came off the rims
when going down hills at "high speed". The car was so overloaded
and under powered that my grandparents had to get out and push the car
up steep hills. My mother couldn't push the car as she was pregnant
with her 1st child - ME. The engine bearings burnt out in the desert
near Reno and my dad lay on the sand for a week overhauling the engine.
I was born in the old General Hospital in LA and my two brothers were
born in our homes in West Hollywood and Sawtelle. My father was an experienced
auto mechanic, but he became a skilled sheet metal worker which he much
preferred.
In 1929, he went to Marin County, which is north of SF across the Golden
Gate, and started his own sheet metal shop. He manufactured furnaces,
duct pipe, rain gutters, etc. A few months later he sent for us. We
had the grand experience of an overnight steamship trip from San Pedro
to San Francisco.
In the next five years we lived in many rented houses in several small
towns in Marin County - Kentfield, Ross, San Anselmo, Fairfax and San
Rafael. There was the beautiful bay, mountain lakes and parks, the giant
redwood trees, and the Pacific Ocean, all close to these lovely little
towns.
Our blissful life came to an abrupt end on my brother Frank's birthday,
June 24, 1934, when I came down with Infantile Paralysis, now known
as Polio. For 2 weeks I suffered from a high fever and my whole body
was sore and tender. I could not move by myself and my mother and grandmother
turned me over in bed without touching me by rolling me over by pulling
on the sheet beneath me. My muscles from my neck down became paralyzed,
with my right side becoming twice as weak as my left side.
My father's sheet metal shop was in the basement of our rented house
on the edge of the San Anselmo business district. The authorities quarantined
our house, so customers wouldn't come near the house because of fear
of the dreaded disease. This ruined my Father's business.
My father had a SF policeman friend who gave him a box of confiscated
fire crackers, since it was near the 4th of July. My father had nothing
else to do, so he sat on the large
porch of our house shooting off firecrackers night and day. The police
and firemen sat in their vehicles across the street and watched, but
like everyone else, they would not come near the house.
During the next 6 months I was gradually able to get out of bed and
start walking. A San Francisco doctor started treating me with physiotherapy.
He had an health resort in the mountains 150 miles north of SF where
there were natural steam geysers, sulfur hot springs and radium caves.
There was a Civil War vintage hotel with old guest cottages that was
served by a rugged dirt stagecoach road that wound across the Coast
Range of Mountains northeast from the little town of Cloverdale on US
Highway 101. The hotel had an ancient guest registrar that had General
Grant's name in it. Mrs. Babcock, a wealthy San Rafael lady, financed
the doctor's conversion of these old facilities into a health resort.
She offered to pay my expenses to live and receive treatment at the
health resort for several months.
It was the spring of 1935, and I was 9 years old. At first I was very
home sick and greatly missed my family. After a week or two, I adjusted
to the new surroundings and made new friends. I had many great experiences
and benefited from the hot mineral baths and the therapy the Doctor's
technicians applied to me.
Throughout his life, my father was an avid hunter and fisherman. During
the summer and fall of 1935, he would bring our family up on weekends
to visit me and to camp and fish in Sulphur Creek, the stream that ran
through the resort. All summer long, tourists would come in on the long
tortures road to hike through the canyon and up the side of the mountain,
to view the awe some steam geysers that roared continuously and the
many strange colorful mineral formations created by hot mineral springs.
Some brave souls with various maladies even put on bathing suits and
sat on wooden benches inside the hot steamy radium caves, which had
been dug by earlier developers of the area.
Stout long hiking sticks were readily at hand for hikers, supposedly
to aid them on their hike. In reality they were to fend off the many
rattlesnakes that were found along the trail. The hotel manager even
bought a bunch of pigs and let them loose to help reduce the rattlesnake
population.
I returned to my parents home in San Rafael the week before my tenth
birthday on October 30, 1935. My parents told me we were leaving California
to go east and live in Detroit, Michigan. We packed all our belongings
into our 1926 Buick sedan (including dog Queeny). We headed east across
Donner summit to Sparks just east of Reno. The next day we headed east
towards SLC along the Truckee River. As we went along at a maximum speed
of 35 mph, my dad would point off the road and say, see that, there
is the old road. I would look and see 2 tracks wandering through the
dirt up and down hill. I later realized that this was the road my parents
and grandparents traveled coming to CA during my prenatal experience
10 1/2 years earlier.
A few days later, I remember eating oatmeal mush in a cafe in SLC. My
father and mother had relatives living in SLC, but he was very anxious
to get to Smithfield where his mother was living, so we did not visit
any SLC relatives.
I can remember driving up to my grandmother's house in Smithfield on
a beautiful Sunday afternoon in November 1935. My father's father had
died the year before I was born. My father's mother had married Robert
Thornley in 1933 and it was his home in Smithfield we came to. The next
morning, Monday morning, Robert Thornley was a little late rising and
sat for a while on the edge of his bed. He told my grandmother he had
a slight headache and did not feel too good. A little while later she
went back to check on him and found him dead from a stroke.
My father's plan was to travel east and start a new life in Detroit,
Michigan, but with his step-father's death, he decided he needed to
stay in Smithfield for a while and help his mother adjust to a new life
as a widow again, and help take care of the 200 white leghorn laying
hens that were her livelihood.
So we had the great experience of enjoying one of Cache Valley's severest
and coldest winters on record. Temperatures went below -20° and
stayed there for 3 or 4 weeks. But my brothers and I put on woolen underwear,
caps and coats and went to school and learned from the local boys how
to swear quite fluently. My best friend in school and church I later
found to be a cousin. After running out of resources, having a cashless
Christmas and not finding much sheet metal work in the dead of winter
in Cache Valley, my father decided to go back to the land of milk and
honey, golden opportunity, and sunshine — LA.
On March 1, 1936, we left Cache Valley. I can remember going up through
the canyon south of the valley in a blinding snowstorm. Since my father
had very little money, we couldn't afford to stop at motels, so he just
kept driving. I remember him being so tired and sleepy as we drove the
narrow roads with deep ditches on each side, he would start to doze
off and the car would begin to wander from side to side. I was afraid
we would end in the ditch. My dad toughed it out and with the help of
our guardian angel, we made it through to a motel someplace in Southern
Utah.
We finally got to LA and stayed with my mother's parents. They lived
in a rented upstairs apartment at 25th St. and Broadway that was owned
by the church and was part of the Adams Ward complex. The day ;after
we got to LA, my father got a job and a week later he rented a small
apt where he and my mother could stay. My brothers and I continued to
stay with my grandparents for a while. A few days after we got to LA
the finance company repossessed our car for long overdue payments. So
dad went down to a used car lot and bought a beautiful Willis Knight
on credit.
After a few months, my father gained enough resources to rent a small
house that was large enough for all of us to live together. It was located
on W. Adams Blvd. on the eastern Culver City limits, near where Washington
Blvd and Adams Blvd merged. Across the street from us there was a small
saloon, a service station and other small businesses. There were no
other structures on our side of the street for 2 or 3 blocks in either
direction. To the south of us lay farm lands and the Baldwin Hills,
which at that time were undeveloped. The house had a large fenced dirt
back yard with large caster bean trees and bamboo thicket. There was
an old reclusive man living in a trailer behind our property on the
alley.
To earn pocket money my brother Frank and I went door to door for miles
around selling magazine subscriptions. Our little brother Jack, a cute,
blond curly headed youngster of 7, would go into the saloon across the
street and sell more magazines in l hour than Frank and I together could
sell in several days.
My mother worked in a laundry in Culver City. This left my brothers
and me alone in the house during the summer. Occasionally Grandma Robinson
came out on the bus to spend the day caring for us. My dad had become
addicted to nicotine when he was 12 years old, so there were usually
cigarettes lying around the house. One morning my brothers and I decided
to see what it would be like to light up and puff. We soon had the house
blue with smoke, when we suddenly saw Grandma Robinson coming down the
sidewalk from the bus stop. We zoomed around cleaning up the physical
evidence of our adventure. In later years I reflected on what a marvelous,
saintly woman Grandma Robinson was not to have mentioned the incident
to us, or to our parents. She must have noticed the house full of cigarette
smoke upon entering the house that day. In any case, we had learned
our lesson. We did not inhale but found the taste objectionable. In
short, it was not a pleasant experience. None of us ever tried smoking
again.
One day there was a lot of excitement around our place. The police found
the bloody dead body of the old man who lived behind us, on the sidewalk
about a 1/2 block from our house. They never found who had murdered
the man. This really shook up my parents and we soon moved to a rented
house in West LA.
This house was unusual. Garages were on the ground floor with living
quarters on the 2nd floor. It was located in a crowded neighborhood
in WLA across the street from a grocery store. The store was owned and
operated by a longtime friend of my parents. They spent many happy hours
together playing pinochle. I resumed the 4th grade there at Sawtelle
Elementary. I had to walk several blocks to and from school and got
very tired. The school nurse examined me and found I had severe scholyosis.
The school sent me to the LA Orthopedic hospital on Flower St for examination.
A few weeks later my father's sister, Aunt LaVon, took me down to the
hospital where I was admitted for a lengthy stay. It was the saddest
day of my life. I felt like a condemned man entering death row.
My back was curved and would become worse as I grew, due to my weak
uneven back muscles caused by the polio. The treatment to correct the
abnormal spinal curvature, was to put me in a body cast split in the
middle with a turnbuckle on one side and a hinge on the opposite side.
The cast came up around the back of my head, sides of my head and jaw.
The lower part of the cast came down over my hips and down one leg to
my knee.
The procedure over a period of several weeks was to turn the turnbuckle
a few turns each day and take back xrays from time to time to determine
the progress in straighting my spine. When the spine was straight, they
cut a hole in the back of the cast and then preformed surgery on my
upper back. They placed bone chips between the vertebra which later
grew together fusing the spine permanently.
They planed to do this in 2 sections with 2 separate operations a few
weeks apart. However, a few days after the first surgery, I got an infection
in my left ankle which developed into ostyomolitis which took several
weeks to get over. My father had the same blood type as mine so he gave
me 2 live blood transfusions to strengthen me in fighting the infection.
A month or so later, they cut off the big body cast and put on a smaller
one that extended from my shoulders to my hips and then sent me home.
I only had to wear this cast for a few months. About a year later they
repeated the whole process again, except this time I didn't get an infection
in my ankle. The Orthopaedic Hospital Doctors, over the next year or
so, performed other corrective surgeries on my abdomen and feet.
The Orthopaedic Hospital continues to have a top rating in their field,
55 years later. In fact, I have known several people in the past 10
years who have been referred to the hospital for corrective surgery
in very difficult circumstances. I owe those surgeons and the hospital
my eternal gratitude for straightening my spine and making it possible
for me to lead a fairly normal life from my teenage years to the present.
If they had not corrected the scholyosis I would probably have wound
up a humped over semi-invalid unable to function and get about normally.
My growing-up life:
My home and Church life was:
My parents were always poor, but we always had a place to live, food
to eat and clothes to wear.
My father changed jobs often and moved us from rented house to house,
from town to town, from school to school; but he nearly always had a
job.
My father was a baptized member, but as an adult, he never went to Church
and he was addicted to alcohol and tobacco.
My mother went to Church when urged to by her parents, but was mostly
inactive until later in her life.
There was always coffee, alcohol and tobacco in our house.
The only Church influence was from my mothers parents. They saw that
we were baptized and received the Priesthood at the proper times.
My Church attendance was hit-and-miss until my teen years.
I lived with my mothers parents while attending UCLA. My Church involvement
was high, both at college and at home.
My schooling was:
From 1929 through 1936; from Kindergarten through the fourth grade,
I attended seven schools in Northern and Southern California and Utah.
(I lost two years of school due to getting polio.)
I had once-a-week home teachers for the fifth and sixth grades.
I attended limited curriculum physically handicapped schools for the
7th through the 10th grades.
I attended a full curriculum high school in the 11th and 12th grades.
I attended and received a BS in Mechanical Engineering at UCLA, June
1949.
Testimony
from a talk given during his Family History Mission in SLC:
My name
is Richard James Nielsen.
I have a wonderful testimony of Heavenly Father and His Plan of Salvation
and of Jesus Christ and His Gospel!! Today, I want to tell you how and
why I have this testimony.
I. My testimony developed and grew as I lived my life.
It grew from hearing and seeing truths taught by my parents, grandparents,
wife, children, some Bishops and Priesthood leaders, Know Your Religion
lecturers, Church class teachers and personnel Scripture study.
Studying and hearing these true teachings were important, but most spiritual
insights came from experiences working with people as their Father,
Husband, Grandfather, Stake Missionary, Home Teacher, Priesthood Leader,
Ward Clerk and in other Church assignments.
I developed love and appreciation for Heavenly Father and The Savior
as creators, through study and observation of how complex and wonderful
our bodies are, and how wonderful all of Their earthly and heavenly
creations are.
But much of my testimony of God's love and the application of Gospel
Principals in my life, came through review of how I was able to accomplish
righteous goals, in spite of
seemingly overwhelming obstacles and difficulties.
II. To explain how this happened, here is a summary of my life until
now.
Pedigree:
I was born Oct 30, 1925, in Los Angeles, California.
My Parents are Gordon Theodore Nielsen born in 1903, in Salt Lake City,
Utah, and Geraldine Robinson born in 1906, in Lewisville, Idaho.
My father's parents are Axel Christian Nielsen born in 1851, in Noestrup,
Denmark, and Betsy Josephine Andersen born in 1866, in Smithfield, Utah.
My mother's parents are Harry Stratford Robinson born in 1880, in Farmington,
Utah, and Mary Julia Myler born in 1877, in Escalante, Utah.
Life History:
I know that you are anxiously waiting to be entertained by the numerous
and sometimes interesting stories about different events in my life.
But President Kennard says you will have to wait until we get together
when there are 2 or 3 hours of leisure time. So, here are a few incidents
from my life that will partially explain how obstacles were overcome
to achieve youthful dreams.
My father lived his adult life as a totally inactive Church member.
He was completely addicted to alcohol and tobacco. This was mostly counteracted
by the influence of my mother's righteous parents. During my childhood,
my grandparents would visit us often and see to it, that my brothers
and I were baptized and received the priesthood in a timely manner.
Later, when I was attending college I lived with my grandparents, attended
Church regularly and received the Mel. Priesthood.
Another obstacle was my haphazard, patchwork schooling. Due to my father's
changing jobs frequently, moving from house to house and from town to
town.
From 1929 through 1936; from Kindergarten through the fourth grade,
I attended seven schools in Northern and Southern California and Utah.
(I lost two years of school after getting polio.)
I had once-a-week home teachers for the fifth and sixth grades.
I attended limited curriculum physically handicapped schools for the
7th through the 10th grades.
I attended a full curriculum high school in the 11th and 12th grades.
This disadvantage was overcome by attentive, caring, skilled physically
handicapped school teachers and home teachers guiding and helping me
gain back one of the two lost school years.
The most significant obstacle throughout my life has been the paralyses
of my body from the neck down, caused by the polio I had in 1934, at
the age of 8 1/2 years. This obstacle, to a large degree, was ameliorated
by corrective surgery performed on my back, feet and abdomen by doctors
at the Orthopedic Hospital in LA. My strength was partially restored
through weight lifting and other exercises that I was encouraged and
taught to do by George Bruce in 1944, 1945 & 1946.
Another obstacle was insufficient funds for attending college. This
was overcome by my friend George Bruce helping me get a job between
graduating from high school and beginning college, by the California
State Rehabilitation Department paying for tuition and books, and by
my grandparents providing me with board and room in their small home.
Another obstacle was my mobility and independence if my physical disability
did not allow me to drive a car. This was overcome by the happy matching
of automobiles designed with left foot clutch operation and my stronger
left leg. My weaker right leg was barely able to operate the gas and
foot brake pedals. If cars in the US had been designed with right foot
clutching, I probably couldn't have driven a car at all. As it turned
out, I have owned and driven 12 cars and pickup trucks with manual transmissions
and 6 with automatic transmissions for a total of about 1,000,000 miles.
Another obstacle was advise from some that the effects of polio would
prevent me from having a family. This was overcome by encouraging advise
from my parents and close friends. So what do you know, Bernice and
I are the proud parents of 5 children and 8 grandchildren.
In conclusion, it seems to me, that someone carefully planned my
life so that I would have many experiences with great obstacles to overcome
and the joyful happiness of overcoming them and thus living a satisfyingly
full life.
