After enlisting fresh out of high school, a bad bout of blood poisoning nearly killed Wallace Nelson at Marine Corps boot camp.
It also probably saved his life.
Following his illness, Nelson was forced to repeat boot camp. Seventy percent of his original platoon, meanwhile, were among the more than 1,000 Marines killed at the Battle of Tarawa in 1943.
“Out of the archives, (my wife, Kathleen) pulled the old platoon pictures,” Nelson, now 90, said. “Here I am, a blond kid way up on the top in the back row, and the whole platoon was wiped out. Everybody.”
Nelson went on to become a gunner and radioman during the war. He also was one of the few guys, at that time, who had gone to radar school.
“Right then, that was a new, secret thing,” he said.
Nelson recalled how a tiny little box in the in the rear cockpit had a small screen that was connected to a small antenna on the wing. That antenna could be directed by the operator who was trained to tell the difference, friend or foe, represented by the tiny blips.
It was also during this time that Nelson’s burgeoning interest in art began to emerge.
“When I got back from a flight and was waiting for the next flight, I’d lean against a palm tree or a tire at the airport and sketch,” Nelson said. “I had a sketch book and would do these pencil sketches. So, the guys say, ‘Oh, there’s an artist. We need a guy in the paint shop to paint airplanes.’ ”
That’s how Neslon ended up in the paint shop putting logos and and other emblems on warplanes.
“All he had was a little packet of color pencils and whatever scrap he could find,” his wife, Kathy, recalled. “When he went to write letters home, he would draw pictures on the letters and the mailman got to where he just couldn’t wait for those letters to come home.”
When he got back from the war, Nelson enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute.
“All they were trying to teach me was just the wild stuff,” he said. “So, I left that behind.”
After nearly being killed in a car wreck in which three young drunk kids hit the vehicle Nelson was a front-seat passenger in, he made his way to Bradley University. He went through the windshield during the wreck and his injuries included a fractured skull, severe damage to his face and a broken femur.
“My plastic surgeon at Mercy Hospital out of Chicago, get this, his name was Wayne B. Slaughter,” Nelson said.
Facing multiple surgeries and months and months of recovery, Nelson enrolled at Bradley University and rode the then newly built Peoria Express train line to commute between school in Peoria and medical treatment in Chicago.
“I’d grab the train to go back to school and my whole face was wrapped up like Frankenstein,” he said. “I’d go back to school, wrapped like a mummy and could only see out of one eye to see the blackboards. Some of these operations didn’t take long, but some of them took hours. Little by little, they kept building me back up.”
Nelson’s early and lasting influences include Wyeth, Hopper, Monet and Homer, among others. Whenever these artists were exhibited in Chicago, Nelson was right there to see it.
“I think they wanted to throw me out because they saw me there all week,” Nelson said of the various exhibitors. “I’d sit on the bench and I’d study. I’d keep wanting to get closer and the guards kept pushing me back. I said, ‘Why don’t you just stand there and hold my coat tail and if I get too close, just give me a yank?’ “
Nelson was studying the artists’ techniques and everything else he could by visiting the paintings in person. He says he learned more through this, and buying books featuring the paintings he liked, than he did at school.
“Then I got into acrylics because with oils you have to wait two or three days,” he said. “If you wanna put something over something else, you gotta wait for it to dry. Acrylics, I learned to paint with those because by the next morning it’s all dry and you can put what’s called glazing, another color, over that.
“Acrylic was a new thing, but you can’t really tell the difference.”
Nelson went to work in Chicago studios designing displays for America’s top retailers followed by decades with Boeing executing graphic design and displays for the Paris and London airships and other international exhibits.
All the while, he painted, often using Kathy’s skills as a photographer on the back roads of the Pacific Northwest, Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico and Hawaii to inspire his work.
“She’s got an eye for beauty,” Nelson said of his wife’s photographs. “Most of these pictures are a composite of things that we saw and lived with.”
The couple now lives in Tracyton and a wide range of Mr. Nelson’s work is on display at ChocMo Bistro in Poulsbo through October.