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About Christmas, we decided that I better not work at Imperial the next summer. I would come down for weekends, and he would come up to Michigan State for weekends. We had a good time and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. I would stay late there at work, and then he and I would go out on a date.
Then we started dating on the QT, which was kind of hard to do in an old office building like that, but we did. I went back up to school, didn’t see or hear from him until the next summer when I went back to work at Imperial. Then we went out and had a nice dinner, came back, and he left the next day for California. He was an hour late, but he came out anyway. My folks thought it would be rather stupid of him to come out in a blizzard. He was leaving for California on Saturday for three weeks. Michigan State was on quarters, so we had to have finals, and I didn’t know when finals were going to be. I don’t know whether I said it out loud or thought, “Why don’t you call me?” He said, “Call me when you come home for Christmas vacation.” I had to end about the third weekend in August, because in those days you could only make $600 and if you made more than that, your folks could not take you as a deduction. We had a few conversations, but didn’t really talk that much. Nelson: Richard Hadine Nelson, and he always said the “H” stood for “honest,” so his name was Richard Honest Nelson.
The crew of the enola gay visits japan hospitals full#
Kelly: You want to introduce him now and say his full name? If I was going down, he was coming up, or vice versa. I was just an expediter, and so I would go downstairs on the squeaky stairs to expedite, find out when the orders were going to be shipped. They made brass fittings and refrigeration parts. The man across the street said he could get me a job, which I got. Then I went off to college in ’51, and came back and I wanted a summer job. I grew up as an only child and went to school in Western Springs and LaGrange.
![the crew of the enola gay visits japan hospitals the crew of the enola gay visits japan hospitals](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2016/05/hiroshima-before-and-after-the-atom/h13_0287/main_900.jpg)
That was my first exposure with anything on the atomic bomb. Anyway, we didn’t hear about it until two days later, and then we did hear about it. We went fishing almost to the Michigan line. He would sneeze and sneeze and sneeze, but we would go up to northern Wisconsin, and ragweed did not grow up there. He was allergic to ragweed in August, and in that part of the country, ragweed grew. I was born in a suburb of Chicago, Western Springs, lived there all of my life. Kelly: Tell me a little bit about yourself, so we can put this in context. Nancy Nelson: My name is Nancy Nelson, N-A-N-C-Y N-E-L-S-O-N. I’d like her to say her name and spell it.