Mr. Nelson

Mr. Nelson
Philadelphia, PA
1966

His store was across the street from our elementary school. At the end of the day, the nuns yelled out every line of dismissal: Alleyway, Firehouse, Church Street, 59^th street, Nelson’s.  We ran to our respective lines and charged home.  Most of us joined the Nelson’s line and ran to his store, the local 5 & dime store.  We pooled our pennies and bought a bag of penny candies:  Mary Janes, Cinnamon dots, licorice strings, etc.

Mr. Nelson was Jewish in this very Catholic neighborhood. So there was some slight hostility all around.  The nuns sometimes referred to him as “that cheap Jew” when a student had been sent to his store in the middle of the morning, on an errand for the nuns, and came back to report that he paid full price, no discount for the nuns as was the custom of the other store owners in the neighborhood.  The nuns got every thing for free from the other merchants. But not from “that cheap Jew” some of the nuns would mutter under their breath, without shame, without care for who could hear them, without thought that we would interpret this action as license to make similar remarks to him and others who differed ever so slightly.

But anyway, every afternoon at 3:10PM, a mob of us would charge in and yell to get his attention, “Hey Mr. Nelson” in tones similar to Denise the Menace.

This infuriated him, “My name isn’t Nelson. It’s Carabell.  That was my father-in-law’s name,” he told us each and every time one of us called him Mr. Nelson.  But this one simple request of respect didn’t register with any of us.  For years, we only addressed him as Mr. Nelson.

Some kids were banished from the store for life for the crime of stealing.  So they did everything in their power to upset this mandate.  Some of us had to serve as decoys while the bad boys snuck in.  We had to call to Mr. Nelson and occupy his time with his usual lecture while the McCoys or the McCains or the McLaughlins snuck in, grabbed a few things and took off.  He usually caught a glimpse of them just a moment too late and then looked back on the decoy to determine if this was a sting or not.  He was helpless in seeking the nuns’ intervention on this matter which could have ended it right there.  They would have gone right to the boys’ home and taken care of business. But Mr. Nelson didn’t have enough sense to give the nuns free merchandise like everyone else so “that cheap Jew” was on his own to handle the deluge of annoying, loud students who flooded his store and tried his patience every single school day for 42 years.

Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School

Philadelphia, PA

1960s