The Star News 10/24/05

An ‘unforgettable’ man
by Britt Aamodt
Special to the Star News

Long after Edward Nelles died, his daughter, Lorraine Dexter, traveled to Milwaukee. She and her brother, Phillip, were visiting George LaBissoniere, a successful business executive and their father’s best friend.

“We were ready to leave,” Dexter remembered, “and George said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I’ve got something I want to give to you.’” He ran back inside and came out with an old-fashioned letterbox. Inside were some 80 letters.

“George said, ‘I saved every letter your dad ever wrote. He was the most unforgettable man I ever met,’” recalled Dexter.

The letters were unforgettable, too. Full of insight and humor, splashed with local color and steeped in the seasons, they embodied a talent that under different circumstances could have launched a brilliant writing career.

But Ed was a farmer. He lived, worked and died on the same plot of land in Fletcher, south of Rogers, that his father, John Nelles, homesteaded in 1861. He had crops to harvest and cows to milk and a thousand other chores demanded by the day-to-day running of a farm.

However, George had recognized his friend’s talent and saved the letters. “He thought something should be done with them,” explained Ellen Nelles Leger, whose grandfather was Ed’s brother.

Though growing up in nearby Dayton, Leger rarely crossed paths with her Nelles relatives. And it wasn’t until 1991 that she became acquainted with Lorraine Dexter and the story of Ed Nelles’ letters.

“Lorraine was losing her eyesight,” said Leger, a former academic dean and researcher in stress management. “So, I would read the letters to her and she would tell me stories related to them.”

Out of those conversations came “Letters to George” (Spring Brook Press, 2005). Edited by Leger, the book collects Ed’s correspondence to George and frames it among Dexter’s reminiscences and historical sidebars about the Depression, the Dust Bowl, Franklin Roosevelt and World War II.

The letters begin in 1912 when Ed is a young husband and father worried about the price of potatoes. He entices George, then a bachelor in Minneapolis, to join him at his “little white house on the hill” to enjoy the fruits of the land—apples, pumpkins, melons, onions and “some fine spring chickens.”

When George moves to Milwaukee, as a fur buyer for a department store, the descriptions grow stronger, as though Ed doesn’t want his friend to miss a single minute of the Minnesota he left behind.

In the spring of 1933 he writes: “The terrors of the long winter days and nights are all forgotten when the old rancher comes home with a pail full of sparkling sweet maple sap. It makes you feel young and handsome again.”

On Ash Wednesday, he recounts that day’s Mass with a substitute priest “who must have been a plasterer in his young days as he was very liberal with the dust. The people looked as though they all slid down a chimney head-first.”

For all the bustle of farm work, dances at the Rogers pavilion, church and family gatherings, Ed never forgot to write. And he never wrote a dull line. His pen gloried in the picturesque underpinnings of farm life: the plow horses, the boxcars full of grain, the turning leaves, and the comfort of a good pipe and a newspaper at the end of the day.

But farming did not come without trials. A severe drought struck Minnesota in the 1930s.

“The terrible heat burnt the green to a desert; while a high dust cloud roamed in the air,” he wrote in 1936. “Every day we saw destruction come closer.”

Of his profession Ed said: “There’s nothing in it but overhead and hard work. You dress second hand and live the same.”

“But my father loved farming because he loved nature, he loved flowers, he loved seasons. He loved everything about growing things,” said Dexter.

Now 92 and living in a New Hope nursing home, she has finally realized the dream of seeing her father’s writing in print. Fifty-five years after Ed wrote his last letter to George, and 47 years after his death in an auto accident, Leger presented Dexter with a copy of “Letters to George.”

“When I gave Lorraine the book,” said Leger, “she lay down to rest and put her arms around it. She said, ‘I will be long gone, but Dad’s stories will still be here.’”

Leger self-published “Letters to George” in 2005. The book is available at Specialty Fashions in Rogers, 763-497-2914.

Journalist

http://www.erstarnews.com/2005/october/24letters.html 

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