Summary:
Theron Nelson is a Lafayette resident since 1950. He was instrumental in forming the Laf-Frantics in 1956. The Lafayette Community Center acquired an 11-acre property on St. Marys Road, which is now Buckeye Fields that is home of the Lafayette Little League.
Oral History:
Ryan McKinley: This is an Oral History interview with Mr. Theron Nelson. The interview is taking place at the St. Mary’s College of California library in the Group Study Room 2. The date is May 2nd, 2014, the time is 10:07 AM, and the interviewer is Ryan McKinley. So when were you born?
Theron Nelson: I was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but I was raised in Southern California. My parents moved to California when I was age three, so I have no knowledge of South Dakota.
RM: When were you born? I don’t mind about the year.
TN: May 8th, 1922.
RM: What were your parents’ names?
TN: My mother’s maiden name was Rosalee Stamper and my father’s name was Lawrence Emerson Nelson.
RM: And were they first generation, or did your grandparents come here first to America?
TN: They were not immigrants, they were from the Midwest and I don’t know how many generations have been in the United States, I’ve been trying to find out the origins of the family in terms of what country they might have immigrated from, but I have never been able to identify that.
RM: And do you know their reason for their move to California from South Dakota?
TN: My father was a professor at Sioux Falls College, and he was given a position at the University of Redlands as a professor, so we moved to Redlands in 1925.
RM: What did your mother do? Was she a homemaker?
TN: My mother was a housewife.
RM: Can you tell me a little about what you remember about when you first came here, just your earliest memories of when you were in California?
TN: One of my earliest memories was going to school and grammar school, they called it junior high school in those times rather than middle school, and then high school, and then I was enrolled at the University of Redlands for three years.
RM: Do you know the name of the grammar school and the elementary school you went to?
TN: Franklin Elementary School.
RM: Were there any specific instances, specific teachers, specific memories from that specific time in that elementary school?
TN: I think a teacher would be Ms. Raye in second grade or something like that. The school was, maybe a quarter mile from my home, so I walked to school, and the school has since been torn down, it was on Colton Avenue in Redlands.
RM: Where did you live in Redlands at the time when you were younger?
TN: Originally, we loved on Stillman Avenue and eventually, after a few years, my father was able to buy a house that was directly across the street from the campus of the University of Redlands and behind the freshman women’s dormitory, and so it was kind of a faculty row block at that time, and so the house on the left was occupied by the music professor and the house on the right was the director of athletics and the one over in the corner was he Latin professor.
RM: In that area, do you remember growing up things you did to entertain yourself, growing up in that kind of faculty row you were just talking about, did the other professors have children that were your age?
TN: Well, I pretty much entertained myself. At that time there were a number of vacant lots around, and so the neighborhood boys and I dug caves in the neighborhood lots, the vacant lots, and at that time, in order to control the weeds, they would have the lots plowed with a character that had a horse and a plow and he would churn the soil and keep the weeds down, and he would get infuriated with our little caves that we had dug around there, and at one time he charged up to the campus, in the building where my father had his office and there was also classrooms and proceeded to holler for my father down the hall of the building, and much to the embarrassment of my father, I got told, quite emphatically not to build anymore holes in the ground for the horse to trip in.
RM: Going from elementary school, what was the name of the middle school that you went to?
TN: What?
RM: The middle school? The junior high?
TN: It was Redlands Junior High School, and it was across the street from the high school, and that was the Redlands High School. They only had one high school in the community at that time.
RM: And some of the specific people or instances from high school or teachers who really stood out, I mean not high school, junior high, while you were there?
TN: I only have one distinct recollection of junior high school and that was an English teacher that I had for two consecutive years and she was the only one who had he habit of pronouncing my name different than everybody else, and she put the emphasis on different syllables, so her version of my name was “Ther-OWN” and my way of talking about my name was Theron, but she kept calling me Ther-OWN for two years.
RM: And at that time your father was still teaching at college and you were still at the faculty row? Okay. So was it a very rural area? You said there was vacant lots and things everywhere, was it built-in community?
TN: It was a very active agricultural town in the sense that there were a lot of groves of orange trees, and at that particular time, they specialized in Navel oranges, and so it was, the Chamber of Commerce kept referring to it as the Navel capitol of the world, but a lot of orange packing houses were operating at that time, in those early times, they since have all but disappeared and most of the groves have disappeared, the subdivisions have taken over.
RM: So now it’s almost like a completely suburban area?
TN: Oh yeah, it’s a completely suburban town now.
RM: Going into… you went to Redlands High School, and did you have any distinctive memories from going to Redlands High School, anything you did on the weekends, things you did to entertain yourself while at Redlands?
TN: Well, in the high schools I was not very athletically inclined, so instead of being in the athletic activities I became a yell leader, so I would follow the teams around as a yell leader along with three or four other people who were designated as yell leaders but that got me into all the games.
RM: Was that only for a specific sport or that was for all the sports?
TN: Basketball and football, primarily.
RM: Is Redlands High still there?
TN: Yes.
RM: Just the junior high was… or the elementary school was taken down, you said earlier?
TN: The elementary school has since been removed. I don’t know about the junior high school but the high school has been rebuilt. The building I was originally going to high school in was a two-story brick building, and brick structures for schools were no longer safe, so they had to demolish the building and build a reinforced concrete building as a meeting of the earthquake codes.
RM: And so has the campus expanded or anything like that?
TN: Yes.
RM: And then from there you said you went to Redlands University?
TN: University of Redlands.
RM: Is that just because your father was teaching there, or did you choose a specific reason to go there?
TN: That was one reason, that because my father’s position there, I was able to get a break in tuition, and I had inquired or looked at a number of different college options at that time, and I couldn’t them at that time, so it was a convenience to be able to afford the university experience, and also to live at home.
RM: And that was around 1940, you started it?
TN: Yes, well, my high school graduation class was 1940, and so I entered college in the fall of ’40.
RM: So the first or second year of college was when Pearl Harbor and World War II started, and did that affect your college experience or you continued through college all through the war?
TN: Well in my second year I was able to go into a dormitory, which my parents were probably pleased happened to get me out of the house, and at that time the dormitory was situated a mile away from the campus. It was a former hotel, Caste Loma Hotel, that the university had purchased as a dormitory, for a men’s dormitory, and so I was down in the lobby of that dormitory, listening to the radio thought Pearl Harbor, and several of the students in the dormitory were of Japanese descent, and so we were all very concerned about what was going to happen to those students, and eventually they were interned.
RM: Where they people you knew or did you just know of them?
TN: We knew them.
RM: Did they ever return in your time there or they left for the internment and they never came back to the university?
TN: They left for the internment center and I’ve never had any contact with them since.
RM: So what were you studying at the university at that time?
TN: Sociology.
RM: So ’41 was your second year, and then you had graduated around ’43 or ’44?
TN: ’44. Class of ’44. Well later was World War II, and so while I was a student at… at that time there was a compulsory military service, and so people were being drafted and as a student I was able to get a deferment from the draft to continue my education up until 1943 at which time those deferments were cancelled and all the students who were on these deferments were inducted into the service. In the meantime, the campus was under a great transformation and they had contracted with the government to house a contingent of Navy reserves and so they had what they called a “B-12” program, not reserves, but the “B-12” program which was the cadets, and so the campus, the men who were being drafted from the campus left and the women remained, and the replacements were these B-12 military and so the composition of the campus changed remarkably at that time, and then I went into the service as… and eventually as a replacement recruit, and ended up in Italy and… wrong place at the wrong time, got myself wounded back in the United States after I was discharged and was able to go through Standard on the GI Bill.
RM: So these Navy reservists or the B-12 that you said came into the University of Redlands, they weren’t students, they were military people just being housed at the university?
TN: They were housed and trained on the campus and they were attending classes, for example, my father was an English professor, but because they had to adapt to what the requirements were for the military contingent, my father ended up being a math teacher as well as an English teacher, so he was teaching algebra, geometry and algebra.
RM: Was that, he had to re-learn that, or just he could already do that and…
TN: He apparently had had some math while he was in college, but he had to re-learn it, a step ahead of the class.
RM: He was learning it a week before he had to teach the class…
TN: Or the night before.
RM: Wow. When you were set off to Italy, when was that?
TN: That would have been 1943, late fall 1943, no, late summer 1943.
RM: And so you were there for about a year? Less than a year? You were there for how long about in Italy?
TN: Six months.
RM: Then after the six months you were sent back and you went to Stanford?
TN: Yeah, I was a replacement in an infantry division, the 34th infantry division and we ended up in a number of different, well, at that time, all of the fighting was in those damn hills in Italy, the hills were not ranges, they were individual mountains, and you go up one side, and then you go down, and you go up at the next one, and then little Italian villages in between , and I had no ideas where it was or what I was seeing, my only knowledge of what was happening in the war was what I could see around me, and we didn’t peek out too much. And I was at Cassino, Mount Cassino, which you may not recognize, but it had a monastery on the top of the hill which was the home of the Benedictine monks, which I believe is the order at St. Mary’s, well this is the home of the Benedictine monks, and so our particular company that I was in was probably the closest to that monastery that we got before it was actually captured by Polish troops later on, but we were relieved by Indian gurkhas, they’re from India. The gurkha troops were under British officers and I was dispatched to lead up our replacements to our positions, and they left, two days later they went across the valley at a rest place and watched as they bombed the monastery, the first time they deliberately bombed a monastery, a religious building.
RM: You said you got wounded shortly after that?
TN: Well, from there I went up to the Anzio beachhead which is south of Rome, and that time it was a stalemate, and we were having a small advance taking place, I ended up in a hole with two or three other people and we were having a counterattack, and somebody lobbed a grenade, and I got a little bit of shrapnel from that grenade. I got a free ride home. That’s what is known as a billion-dollar wound.
RM: So from there they sent you… you were in a hospital in Italy?
TN: Well, when they picked me up and took me to… they loaded me onto a Jeep, on top of a Jeep, well, for an infantryman to be on top of anything is dangerous, you wanted to be down, as close to the ground as you could when they start shelling, or mortar fire, and so I was terrified of being carried back to a Battalion 8 station, where they humiliated the people, and then from there, put into an ambulance and taken back to a field hospital outside of Anzio, and you know I was terrified being in the back of an ambulance because, again, Anzio was a flat area just like a pool table and had been a development for Mussolini’s time where they had drained a swamp area and put a lot of drainage canals and ditches to drain the water out, but essentially it was a flat area surrounded by hills where the Germans had observation of everything that moved on that level of plane, and so anything that moved would be subject to being hit by artillery cause they could see you or whatever was happening. Nothing happened during the day, everything was quiet, but at nighttime things came alive, that’s when you moved, so this was at the middle of the night that we were still going back to Naples, eight miles or so, they were probably eight miles in, and so we got to the field hospital, and the field hospital had several direct hits from the artillery, German artillery, and they had killed four nurses in that, so the tents had comprised the hospital had sandbags about four feet high inside the tent, surrounding the inside of the tent to provide protection for the patients who were on cots, and so they took them back to that hospital, they did surgery there, and from there I was put onto a hospital ship which was illuminated at night with the big red cross on it, all painted white with the red cross on it and taken back to Naples, which was south of Anzio, and we were put into a hospital there which was a converted elementary school which I think was about five stories high, we were about on the third floor, and the Germans were still bombing the town, occasionally, so I was in this hospital and in a ward that was mainly comprised of amputees, and from there I was put on a boat back to the United States.
RM: And when you got back to the United States, that’s when you went to Stanford on the GI Bill?
TN: After I got through the, well, one of my problems was I had a partially severed nerve behind the knee which was the peroneal nerve, the nerve controlled the ability of your foot to lift and flex, so I was not able to lift my toes or lift my foot, so that nerve was regenerating itself at the rate of about an inch a month so I was at a hospital in Modesto almost a year, so my total time in the hospital was like eighteen months, seventeen months, but most of the time I was working as a patient, and ambulatory patient in the hospital, but they had fitted my shoe with a spring attachment, so whenever I would walk the spring would lift the toe every time I would raise my foot off the floor, my toes would go up with the spring, so I wouldn’t rip over going up stairs.
RM: You said you were working as a patient in the hospital? What were you doing as part of your work?
TN: The service office that was devoted to patients who were being discharged, military discharges, medical discharges, trying to convert their military experience to civilian activity, so we were doing occupational therapy, occupational counseling at that time, trying to provide some guidance as to how they might be able to be gainfully employed after they got out of the service with their medical discharge.
RM: And then from there, when you were discharged from the hospital, what did you do then?
TN: I was actually discharged to go back to mike duty, and so I was sent to Santa Barbara, and there for only maybe a couple of months, then I was able to get out on accumulated points, by that time the war was over, and so this December of 1945 when I was discharged, or Japan was over in August of 1945.
RM: And then from there, that’s when you went on the GI Bill or did you do something else?
TN: After I was discharged and I applied to Stanford and was able to go to Stanford to finish my Bachelor’s Degree and then go on for a Master’s Degree.
RM: And how many years or credits left did you have on your Bachelor’s Degree? Were you still studying…
TN: I had three years credit at the University of Redlands so I had to finish up one year at Stanford another year to get the Master’s Degree.
RM: And you were studying sociology still?
TN: I finished up with Sociology, and got the Master’s Degree in Sociology as a follow-up to what I was doing at the office in the hospital, more occupational counseling, so it was occupational testing really.
RM: After you got your Master’s, that’s what you started doing as a profession?
TN: Yes, when I got out of college, I was able to get a position at East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland in the personnel department, and one of my functions at that time was civil service examinations, so I was helping prepare exams and conducting civil service tests.
RM: And that was in Oakland, how long did you do that?
TN: Seventeen years there, and then I was able to get a position at the city of Concord as their personnel director.
RM: So in the seventeen years there at the East Bay MUD, you were doing the same thing with the social…
TN: Yes, and being promoted, along the line to being charged with an examining unit of the personnel department.
RM: And at the time did you live in Oakland?
TN: Started out living in Oakland and moved to Lafayette in 1950.
RM: And you were still at the East Bay Municipal when you moved to Lafayette?
TN: I’m still there, yeah. Until 1965, you know, I went to Concord, but I continued to leave into Lafayette.
RM: What prompted your move from Concord to Lafayette?
TN: We were in a rental unit which was a converted multi, well, about three story high… originally a single family home, cut it up into apartment units, and so we had an apartment there and had a child, and Lafayette was beginning to… the first wave of tract houses, and so we came out and bought a lot that was scheduled to have a house built on it, one of the first subdivisions of Lafayette in 1950, and we’re still there.
RM: And where is that?
TN: On Sweet Drive.
RM: And how was… at that time it was basically all forest land and things like that, and they were just developing it at the time you moved there in 1950, or there was already some of Mt. Diablo Boulevard and things like coming up?
TN: (inaudible) freeway, and the public transportation system was the Greyhound bus line on Mt. Diablo Boulevard, so I came here by bus and eventually ride-pooled with people who were living in this direction, about four or five of us would pool themselves into a carpool and worked at the same place.
RM: May I ask you about your wife? You had mentioned just now that you had a child and you moved up here once the homes… when did you meet your wife?
TN: At the University of Redlands. We were in the same class and she was living across the street at the freshman dormitory.
RM: And you kept in touch through all those years from Redlands all the way up until you came back, okay. When you came to Lafayette it was just developing, was the development moving pretty fast at that time? You said the were just starting to build the first wave of homes.
TN: Well, yeah, it was just beginning to… all of the movement, the population movement was moving up into the suburbs from Oakland and San Francisco, and so it was becoming a more popular place to live, and it was unincorporated at that time. All of the services were through the county, and so Lafayette didn’t become incorporated until about 1964 I think it was.
RM: And you said you had a child at that time, do you remember where they went to school?
TN: A child at the time we moved into, then we had a since, after we came out here, we had another child.
RM: And they went to school in Lafayette and the elementary schools and things like that? When you came, I know from our emails and your biography, you did a lot of theater, you were involved in theater as I’ve been told, is that correct?
TN: Involved in the backwards kind of way, yes, if you want to call it theater. Came out in 1950 and in a few years I became involved with some of the activities in the community and joined what was at that time a men’s group called the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and the women, the wives at that time were also becoming equally involved in organizations such as the one that Betsy originated, the Suburban Women’s Club. Well, I also became involved with a group that had already formed and had spent a lot of time seeking a site for a community center, and they had found a place on St. Mary’s Road, the 7-11 on St. Mary’s Road, eleven, almost twelve acres of land that they thought would be suitable for a community center location and they wanted to acquire that before it was gobbled up for more subdivisions, so they had the committee, a board of directors that had been operating to acquire this property, and after they had selected the property I joined that group, and eventually I became president of that, at that time it was called the Community Center, later on it became the Community Center Incorporated, as an entity. Now, that is a precursor to what is now the Community Center. The two of them were not at that time related. The community center that you know now on St. Mary’s Road didn’t exist at that time, so the only thing that existed was this citizen’s group trying to acquire and develop a site, and that’s when I joined it, and so one of the events that we were trying to do was to engage the community in a fundraiser venture to pay for the land and to start using the property in some way, and so I had the bright idea of trying to encourage individuals and groups to put on their own fundraising event to raise money and contribute to this overall project. It was called “Spring Fervor”, trying to encourage people to go out and do that, and this was in the latter part of 1985, or ’86, I think it was, and Betsey Young and Geri Burnside and her husband Dick Burnside and another couple who were active in the same organizations, the Suburban Men’s Club and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Jack and Evelyn Peterson, met in Burnside’s kitchen, around the kitchen table like this, and decided, well, maybe we could put on a show to encourage people to attend a show and contribute money to this venture of Community Center, so that started what is now known as LaFrantics, and LaFrantics got started with a melodrama variety act following that under the direction of a welties that we hired to do the job and they provided also many of the costumes and the script for the melodrama, and the show started in 1956 and ran for 31 years in the same format, and there’s the first ten years. Here’s a flier for the Spring Fervor, and this is the introduction to the program. This binder is the ten years of the show, and I have another twenty years to go, so that keeps me out of trouble, and a lot of the material is here and is reproduced here is from the scrapbooks that Betsy Young had developed as part of the LaFrantics, her personal one as well as books that were generated as the Woman’s Club, taking newspaper articles that related to their activities, but the interesting part of the thing was in making a list of the people from the programs, making a list of all the people that participated over the years was 470 people were either on stage or behind the scenes helping with this show, and there’s only two people who were in every show, and that was Jerry and Dick Burnside. Now this was not to be confused with… well, let me go further. The community center continued to function as an entity prior to the incorporation of the city, and in about 1958 or so, the LaFiesta Square merchants had a building that they had put on there in the parking lot to house the Santa Claus for the Christmas season, and so the Christmas season was over and the building was to be demolished, and so on our Board of Directors of the community center at that time was Al Anacarrio, who was a local contractor, and so with his guidance, we decided, well, we needed to have some use of the property, you get people onto the property as quickly as we could, and it would be a shame to have that little building demolished, we could use it on the property, so he arranged to have a foundation laid and in the middle of the night, that building was moved to St. Mary’s Road about two miles to the property at 711 St. Mary’s Road where it now stands, and it’s been used ever since. Now this is over 50 years ago, and when the building was first installed, we added onto the building restrooms and a kitchen so it could be useful for group meetings, and it has been renovated several times, and I think the Rotary Club most recently has renovated the building so it continues to be used regularly now, what is really the only building on that property. After the city became incorporated the property was deeded to the city and seemed to be paying for the city operation under the recreation department and they had a couple of ballfields on it, and a few years ago there were federal and state grants to upgrade the facility and is now called Buchanan Fields.
RM: You’re been involved in that the whole time?
TN: When I became employed at Concord, I dropped all civic activities, I was out of it at that time, and so I had dropped out of the… they had successors, presidents after I had been involved for several years, and so the people that were successors to my time deeded the property to the city and the city is now responsible for… but as a result of the activity of trying to get the community center established, I’ll have to give you a little bit of, well, I’ll finish this… I was given some recognition in 1957 as being named at that time Man of the Year.
RM: “Man of the Year Theron Nelson relaxes with his wife, Elizabeth, daughter Debbie and son Chris at the family home on Sweet Drive,” from the Lafayette Sun.
TN: So that was in recognition of the community center activity at that time. Now, my two children, Debbie and Chris, both went to elementary school at the school which is called Burton Elementary School on St. Mary’s Road. As the population changed over a period of several decades, there no longer was a sufficient need for that particular school, so it was abandoned, and the city then bought it as a site for the end that developed as a community center, so now the city of Lafayette Community Center is the former Burton School, not the same name as what is now Buchanan, no, Buckeye Fields, so the two locations are both on St. Mary’s Road but quite different locations.
RM: So the current one was originally an elementary school at the time, until at some point they moved and turned it into the current community center? Hmm. I’m just curious, this picture of you in the newspaper, do you remember this day when they took this photograph? Did they set you up like this around the couch and reading the paper?
TN: At that time, it was the Lafayette Sun that was sponsoring the Citizen of the Year, which they called at that time Man of the Year, and so they called and said I was to be named the one and would like to set up an appointment to take a photograph, so they came to the house and took the photograph of the family at that time.
RM: So staying in Lafayette all those years, what are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen over time, obviously it’s more developed now with all those shops on Mt. Diablo Boulevard and things like that, and the freeway.
TN: Well, the biggest physical change is the introduction of the freeway and eventually BART. Those right-of-ways created a lot of displacement of businesses and residents, so in terms of significant changes, that was the biggest thing, and of course there’s the subdivision era which ran its course, and now, there’s a lot of infill building going on to build single family housing on vacant lots, but currently, the emphasis is on multiple housing on Mt. Diablo Boulevard, so that’s making quite a significant change in the physical landscape as well as lot of businesses are having to be displaced to create a site for them to build apartment buildings.
RM: All right, this was a wonderful interview, that’s all the questions I have, if there’s anything else you wanna add…
TN: Well, one other thing. One of my events on my brief time on this Earth was approaching my 90th birthday, and my kids asked, “Well, what would you like to have for your 90th birthday?” and I said, “Nothing, I’m downsizing, there’s nothing I need, just send me a card”. That was a challenge to my son and my daughter and my six grandchildren. They decided that I needed cards. So my son started passing out notices to everybody he went across.
RM: So for your 90th birthday they sent out all these things asking for anybody and everybody to send you postcards and birthday cards and…
TN: So ended up with, I think it’s 607 by the time I got through, and they were from 41 states, maybe 42, and 22 different countries. Those cards came in over a period of weeks and months and on my birthday alone, on May the 8th, I received 100 birthday cards.
RM: And so these were from people you don’t know at all?
TN: Never had any idea who they were.
RM: So your son and daughter sent these out randomly?
TN: Randomly, and interestingly enough, I didn’t realize this possibility, he had stamps made and passed on the stamps also, but the stamps were of my pictures, and I didn’t realize the post office would allow you to make them, I thought it was like counterfeiting currency, I didn’t know that you could create your own stamps, but he did.
RM: And they’re from all, some of these are, there’s old pictures all the way up to present day pictures, some black-and-whites that look like they’re from the fourties.
TN: Postcards as well as letters.
RM: That’s great. In this picture, some of the postcards are the photographs as well. This is wonderful. May I ask you, does your son and daughter live in Lafayette now, or do they live somewhere else?
TN: My son lives in Concord, and my daughter lives in Porterville, which is down in the Central Valley in Bakersfield and Fresno.
RM: Do they have a connection aside from growing up there? Do they have any connection to the events in Lafayette now or as they were growing up?
TN: They just grew up here and went to school here, they don’t have any particular connection other than us.
RM: They went to Acalanes High School and things like that?
TN: No, they didn’t, my daughter went to Del Valle, which is now the adult education place, it’s no longer a high school, and my son went to Campolindo. Neither went to Acalanes. End of story.
RM: Thank you so much for this. Interview ends at 11:11 AM.
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