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My Family
A family is such a continuous line that deciding where to start is always a bit of a dilemma. Usually when I think of an immediate family, I think of me, my wife, and my children, but having reached the age that I have, I realize that families begin much further back ... and they go on much farther into the future. So I'll begin here in the middle of things and tell you about my immediate family and reach back and project forward as best I can as I add things to this site.
My father, William Walter Nelson, and my mother, Grace Elizabeth Baxter Nelson, were married in 1933, and I was born in November of 1941 at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, GA. My parents lived in Stone Mountain, GA during the early years of my life, and in 1952, they moved to Clarkston, GA, where I attended school from the 6th through the 10th grade. I spent the last two years of High School in Stone Mountain and graduated from there in 1959. During 1958, I met Carole Jean Oglesbee, when she was 15, and she and I married on August 25, 1962 before my senior (and her junior) year at Mercer University in Macon, GA.
Jeffrey Charles Nelson was born on Christmas Day 1964 in the Naval Hospital at the Charleston, SC, Naval Base. We lived on James Island in a duplex on Riverland Terrace at the time. Soon however, we moved back to Georgia when I got out of the Navy, and Jeff grew up in and around Atlanta, mostly in Stone Mountain.
On September 10, 1968, Michael David Nelson was born at Dekalb General Hospital in Decatur, GA. At the time of Mike's birth, Carole and I were living in her mother's home on Memorial Drive in Dekalb County. Soon my consulting job took me to Kannapolis, NC, for a tour of duty consulting with Cannon Mills, and the family joined me for the two years we lived there, from 1972 until 1974. In 1974, we moved back to Atlanta and lived in the Les Jardins apartments on Henderson Mill Road. In 1975, we bought a home on Rockborough Trail in Stone Mountain, GA, where we lived until I left for Knoxville in 1979.
In 1976, our family decided to take a three-week summer vacation to attend the annual International S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A., Inc. Convention in San Francisco. We drove out on Interstate 20 to Los Angeles for about a week, then up to San Francisco via the Big Sur, and after the convention, we drove back by a northern route to our home in Stone Mountain. During this trip, we visited a significant number of the major tourist sites in the United States, including: Carlsbad Caverns, the Petrified Forrest, the Grand Canyon, the Roy Rogers Museum, Universal Studios, the Big Sur, the Muir Woods, the Golden Gate Bridge and park, Chinatown in San Francisco, Yellowstone National Park, Mount Rushmore, the St. Louis Arch, and a lot of the Interstate Highway System of this country.
As I have said in the " About Me" section of this web site, I took a job with Vernine and Associates, Inc., in Knoxville in June of 1979. Soon thereafter, Carole and I began divorce proceedings and by 1981 we were divorced. Carole remarried a man by the name of Jack Holland, and they lived in Stone Mountain in the Rockborough house. I am extremely grateful and lucky that Carole and I were able to divorce without the usual recriminations and hostilities that so many couples go through.
In 1983 when Mike was 14, Carole and Jack began having difficulties managing him and his needs as he was growing into manhood. I drove to Atlanta for a "family conference" where I presented Carole, Mike and Jack a letter I had written in which I stated what I wanted to be the outcome of that conference. As it turns out, I asked that Mike be allowed to come to Knoxville to live with me, and they agreed. So from that point on, Mike came here to grow up, and I took on the task of being a single parent of a teenage boy. I bought my current home in 1984 and hired Vickie Cutts as a live in nanny for Mike because I needed someone who would be able to be here while I travelled in my job as a consultant. Though there were some rocky times for Vickie in filling that role and for Mike in having to live in that atypical environment, we made it through amazingly well.
In 1996, I attended the Olympics in Atlanta. That provided me the opportunity to conduct an interview with a young man associated with putting it on. Here is what I wrote about that interview.
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