Paving the Road to Success

by R L Nelson

Overview

Fifty years ago, Richard L. "Dick" Nelson started his career with a small loader.
He established his business in Princeton, Illinois, a small rural community with a current population of 7,600.
today, he is the founder of Nelson Enterprises which includes Advanced Asphalt Company, TCI Manufacturing and Sales, Tri-Con Materials, Northwest Illinois Construction LLC, Pavement Maintenance Services, Inc., D&J Leasing and AAA Aviation LLC.
Nelson Enterprises has achieved $1.5 billion in total sales, has worldwide patent recognition, employs approximately 300 people and rents 100 trucks a day during construction season.
Dick is the son of Malcolm and Frances Nelson (both deceased) and was raised in Princeton with five siblings (three of whom are deceased).
He is a graduate of Princeton High School and served in the Army.
He and his wife, Judy, have three grown children, Leanne (Jeff) Martin, Laurie Wallace and Steve (Gina) Nelson. They also have four grandchildren, Nicole Martin, Kelsey Wallace, Colin and Audrey Nelson.
Dick attributes much of his success to his "team" of talented and dedicated professionals.
He has also achieved success and national awards because of his God given mechanical talent, hard work, determination and what he calls a "Bachelor of Common Sense Degree from Life University".
Dick has contributed a multitude of volunteer service hours to the Princeton Park Board, United Way, Cub Scouts, Little League and St. Matthew's Church.
His passion is flying. And to that end, he built his own helicopter.
In honor of his 50th anniversary in business, an open house was held to recognize his "team" and business milestones. At this event, the Nelson family established an annual scholarship at Princeton High School for a senior student planning to attend a vocational school.
Doug Oberhelman, CEO of Caterpillar, was also in attendance at the open house and announced that Caterpillar will match the Nelson family annual scholarship. This is a tribute to the Nelson family and Nelson Enterprises for service to the community, central Illinois and the State of Illinois.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781463450083
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	11/07/2011
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.34(d)

Read an Excerpt

Paving the Road to Success

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By R. L. 'Dick' Nelson

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 R. L. 'Dick' Nelson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4634-5008-3

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Chapter One

Where It All Began

The Golden Rule

I've always said that I learned my formula for success over the course of my life. This process began at home, and throughout my life, every time I thought of home, I thought about the Golden Rule.

I grew up at 712 N. First Street in Princeton, Illinois, and our family attended St. Matthew's Church. My parents, Malcolm and Frances Nelson, taught me to follow the Golden Rule, which is in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 12. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is the foundation stone on which any good life is built.

It was my stone.

My Dad: Ahead of His Time

Every family has its challenges, and the Nelsons were no exception. My grandfather, Clarence Wilbert Nelson, went to Boone, Iowa, from Sweden. He served in the Spanish-American War as a private in Company H-49 Regiment Iowa and served on the ship the Maine in 1898. Clarence married Emily Augusta Malcolm in 1902 in Henry County, and they had four children—Myrtle, Malcolm, Margaret, and Milo. He farmed a homestead in Woodhull, Illinois, and made a good living on the farm until he experienced a disabling illness or injury when my father was fourteen years old. My dad (Malcolm) was called out of the eighth grade to pick the standing corn in the field and get it stored for the winter. Back then it was all done by hand. That was it. My father never went back to school, because his family needed him.

But his lack of formal education didn't stop him from teaching himself.

Dad was an avid reader, well versed on many subjects, and with an unquenchable curiosity and a definitive mind. If he read it and thought he could use it, it was stored in his brain forever. If it was something mechanical, he couldn't wait to get his hands on it. Dad was innovative even in his teens, tinkering with this and modifying that. He made the family gas-powered tractor more powerful and efficient by drawing vapor from the cooling system and injecting it into the carburetor to increase the horsepower so the field got plowed faster. Talk about being ahead of his time! In the field of aviation, water injection was used in World War II for short bursts of added thrust in energy.

During my younger years, my family visited old friends and relatives at various farms. With all young kids, the game was to find something interesting and keep busy while the old folks talked away the afternoon. I remember one story where a promoter drifted through the countryside selling shares on some "get rich quick" oil speculation. Apparently, Grandpa Nelson bought in, but the results were not so good. Like they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

Greed is a terrible thing.

At that time, my grandmother's family owned a residence in Princeton. And I believe the Nelson family move to Princeton came about because of my grandfather's financial setback.

My Mother's Roots

My mother's life was torn apart when she was three years old. She remembered being hurried out of their residence one evening. Her mother had died unexpectedly of dropsy (better known as edema). Back then they called it a heart attack. Alta Frances Lange and her sisters, Jesse and Minnie, were more than their farmhand father could take care of by himself. Increasingly turning to alcohol to numb his pain, he split Jessie, Minnie, and Alta and sent them to three different relatives. After his children left, he lived in a barn.

Alta later insisted on being called Frances. She went to live with her Aunt Ricka and Uncle Millard Searl on Elm Street in Princeton, Illinois. They owned a horse, cows, and chickens, so they had plenty of beef, milk, and cottage cheese. Uncle Millard hated cheese, and since young Frances wanted to be like him in every way, she grew up hating cheese too.

It was the simple pleasures that Mom enjoyed the most. She pushed her favorite dolls in her special doll buggy. She doted on her pet chicken, which had lost one leg in a mower accident. For hours, she looked at 3-D pictures on the stereoscope. She enjoyed hot baths in a big washtub with the water heated from the stove using coal or dried corncobs. Trips to the grocery store were always an adventure, with carcasses of beef and pork hanging in the back of the store and thick inches of sawdust on the floor to catch the drippings. On a hot summer day, she sucked on the ice chips Ed Hansen would give her from his horse-drawn ice wagon. After Sunday church, she felt like a princess being driven around town in the family's red-tasseled surrey. As much as she enjoyed the family's first Model T Ford, it was the home's conversion to indoor plumbing that Mom remembered as the finest improvement that ever happened in her life.

Like all little girls, Mom wore a dress to school, and her long curls cascaded down her neck. She loved music, and although she never learned to play any instrument, she liked to sing. She also liked arithmetic. In her early school days, Johnny Warfield helped her out with her times tables and helped her make sense of fractions.

My mother would get up at the crack of dawn when the circus came to Princeton. She'd watch the railroad cars unload, and when the Greatest Show on Earth began, she'd have front-row seats. The Bureau County Fair was less glamorous but still a lot of fun. Mom would eat fried chicken and potato salad with her family under a big shade tree before marching off to gorge herself on soda pop and treats from the midway. She also loved visiting the animal barns, admiring the fancy needlework, and studying the home-grown produce and canned goods.

Mom attended Princeton High School and took mostly secretarial classes. Even into her nineties, she could remember the names of her favorite teachers—Maude Cox, Ferris Trimble, Miss Genevieve Ashdown, and Miss Stetson. When the high school building burned down, classes shifted to the Mission Covenant Church, Princeton City Hall, and the post office.

Her after-school and weekend job was at The Chocolate Shop owned by two Greek brothers who scrupulously guarded their secret recipes in the basement. No one was allowed to set foot in the candy-making area except them. Later she worked as a clerk for a dry goods store, where she sold bolts of cloth for people who sewed and made their own clothes at home.

After Mom graduated from Princeton High School in 1926, she continued to attend what was then the English Lutheran Church (currently St. Matthew's Church). She joined the choir and loved to sing. She recalled one family, the Nelsons, who were habitually late. A son named Malcolm worked at Erickson's Greenhouse, and even though he had a good voice, he never joined the choir. However, he was active in the Lutheran League and attended many church activities. That's where my parents met. They were married on Christmas day in 1927. They had six children—Wilbur, Robert, Marilyn, Norma, Ronald, and myself. We went to church every Sunday as a family.

After my parents wed in 1927, my dad switched jobs and went to work for Hade Ford Garage as a mechanic. He was always a Ford man until he switched over to REO when he started his own agency later in life.

Malcolm and Milo: The Early Years

By temperament, my father was suited to be his own boss, and that's when he went into the construction business with his brother, Milo, in the early 1930s, about the same time that I was born. When Nelson Brothers came into existence, the inventory included some old dump trucks, one of the first crawler tractors in the area, and a pull-type grader. Dad taught himself arc welding to keep the equipment repaired and reinforced. He loved to build things, and he had a need for speed.

He would always adapt by trying to improve a piece of machinery, making it better, more durable, or faster. Nothing was wasted.

Milo was skilled at running any kind of machinery. The company was getting along fine because motor cars were replacing horses and roads had to be built. They helped build the Hennepin Pike, trucking dirt to build the causeway to the bridge. The bridge replaced the ferry service that had serviced the area for years. Before the lock system was constructed, the river could be forded when it wasn't flooded. With the construction of the locks to control the Illinois River, the ferry was necessary to get across the river.

The same old dump trucks were used in the construction of Route 26 running from Princeton to Bureau, Illinois.

Not only did Dad love to build things, but he also developed a knack for blowing things up. Things that could not be moved by machine were dynamited. Dynamite was readily available, and no special license was required. Dad would buy it by the box. My brother Bob remembers that Dad would take a stick of dynamite, maybe break it in two for a smaller job, put a little hole in the stick, and insert a little wooden peg about the size of his pinky finger. He'd add the blasting cap and set it to a six or twelve-volt charge, and big things would explode in a hurry.

During the Great Depression, there was a WPA project to upgrade the Bureau County Courthouse. The local officials were pretty clever about going around a federal government bureaucracy, and what was supposed to be an "upgrade" turned into a total demolition except that they kept the room where the safe was housed in order to meet the letter of the law.

Outsmarting bureaucrats has been around since the beginning of time. I have an old photo of my dad on a crawler tractor in front of the rubble that used to be the courthouse. But the photo Dad wanted was the one he didn't get. He hired a local photographer, positioned him several hundred feet from the bell tower from the school, and told him to snap the shutter when he saw the blast. There would be time for him to duck behind the tree before the fallout of debris from the blast would arrive at the safe area. He never got the photo. The explosion spooked the photographer, and he took refuge behind the tree and forgot to get the shot.

Dad was a real expert on how tree stumps could be removed and old buildings could be destroyed. Fear wasn't in his vocabulary. He was known for his expertise in demolition when something in the surrounding area needed to come down. Dad was well aware of where to plant the charge.

Jobs continued for the Nelson Brothers, and the need for sand and gravel became more prominent. Timber was cleared along the Mississippi River near Galena and Savanna, Illinois. Erosion was repaired along the banks of the Illinois-Mississippi Canal around Tiskilwa. Sand and gravel was scooped by hand from exposed deposits near Bureau. Princeton's old city dump, near Captain Swift's Bridge, was once a gravel pit. During big jobs, machines were used for loading. Scooping sand by hand-shoveling was the only method if the portable equipment had moved out of the area. Dad had acquired a conveyor, but material still had to be hand-shoveled onto the belt. I was a small boy and wanted to help. I was told to stay out of the way, so I shoveled on the left side of the conveyor; I still shovel left- handed today. The big guys were working on the right side, so that put me on the left side.

Nelson Brothers also contracted street projects. On a lot of those projects, Wilbur drove the truck, Bob drove the tractor, and Dad operated the motor grader. Just like in the game of checkers, Dad had several moves of the dirt all figured out ahead so the jobs moved smoothly. I could barely reach the pedals, but I learned to move a truck at a very early age on a street job. My brother would put the truck in low gear. I could move it from pile to pile as they would scoop into the dump box.

Dad loved heavy equipment, and since he couldn't afford to buy it all new, he bought used equipment and then "jerry-rigged" it with improvements. He built a semitrailer to move equipment more efficiently. Just about everything he did, he did with old truck frames, stray hunks of metal, and cast-off parts. He would take the junk stuff and make it usable.

As a young child, I was told how hard the Great Depression years were for many families. But ironically, those years were good for the Nelson brothers. They were busy rebuilding projects then. For the Vernon Street project, Dad bid against Western Sand and Gravel and came in with the low bid. The company was small, and the project required everyone's help. Wilbur and Bob were in charge of lighting flares, marking the damage points. And every morning, the flares had to be put out. I got on my bike on Sunday morning and decided to go with them. We hadn't told anyone I was going. When we got home everyone was in deep trouble. It was a day never to be forgotten. It was never to happen again.

Communication was stressed, and it continues to be one of the most important things to have a successful business or things just won't work well.

Because of our large family, Dad wasn't drafted for World War II, so he stayed home and kept improvising to find work. No matter how impossible the situation or challenge, Dad would adjust and make it work. For the war effort, a huge defense plant was constructed near Amboy where Route 26 and Route 30 met. Bunkers had to be built to store the powder that was packed into the shells or to make bombs. Some of those bunkers are still around today. Miles of perimeter fence needed to be built to surround the area and provide security. Dad was in the thick of it all.

No roads were built but Dad found a need to fill.

The Early Family Years

My mom and dad's early married life was filled with work, but there was also time for listening to WLS on the radio and reading the Bureau County Republican, the local newspaper. Saturday-night shopping and exchanging hometown news with neighbors was a ritual. Farmers would park uptown, and sharing news was the main event. The stores in Princeton were mostly family owned, and each one had its own claim to fame, such as hand-cut meat, homemade sauces, hand-dipped ice cream, old-fashioned candies, and cloth goods. This was a way to get together to share news, and it went on for years. But the advent of TV changed all that.

Eating out was a rare luxury, and Mom grew, raised, and canned most of the food we ate. For a while, we owned a field across from the Princeton High School football field where we raised our own asparagus. Since I was small, I'd stay back and help Mom do odd jobs like pick strawberries and help with house cleaning while Wilbur and Bob were commissioned to help my dad.

There was nothing that Mom made for us that we didn't like. Everything that Mom made was delicious, especially her fried chicken. We raised our own chickens, or we'd go out and buy a dozen or so chickens from a farmer. We'd chop their heads off, put them in scalding water, pull off the feathers, soak them in salt water to give them a little extra flavor, and then take them down to the meat locker where we rented space. On Saturday nights, besides just touring the town, it became a ritual to get some meat and strawberries out of the locker for our Sunday dinner.

Despite a tight family budget, Dad made sure Mom had all the latest appliances. He bought one of the area's first electric stoves displayed at the Bureau County Fair. After years of using an old washer with its hand wringer and wash tubs, she got a washing machine. It was installed in the kitchen so she could cook and wash clothes simultaneously. The washer jumped around so much in the agitation and spin dry cycle that Dad had to bolt it to the kitchen floor. My siblings and I used to watch through the glass window mounted in the door as it went through its cycles. It was a marvel and was almost mesmerizing.

I wouldn't say we were poor. We were just an average, hard-working family. We had what we needed. And we didn't want a lot. We were brought up with simple wants and needs and limited expectations. Our clothes were never fancy. We all got along pretty well, but Bob and Norma did like to stir things up to keep things interesting.

It was a good life. But I do remember the gnawing feeling sometimes that I was the "runt of the littler" and that our family came from the other side of town. We grew up on the north side of Skin Creek, which was the unofficial boundary marker between those who were well off and those of us who raised "taters and maters" (potatoes and tomatoes) to make ends meet.

In my life experience, I've found that happiness is found between the two ears. It's not a place or material things. Comfort may be improved with more, but contentment is all thought.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Paving the Road to Success by R. L. 'Dick' Nelson Copyright © 2011 by R. L. 'Dick' Nelson. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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