Harold L. Nelson, 1917–1996

Abstract

Harold L. Nelson, 1917-1996 When Bud Nelson retired in 1981, I asked him if he planned to do more historical research and writing, now that he was freed from teaching and administration. Not if my health holds, he said. For fifteen years his health did hold, and in his retirement he fashioned a new and exemplary career as a naturalist and environmental activist. Bud's return to nature was a natural move for him. The outdoors was a lifelong love, a love that had grown up in childhood days spent on the family's lakefront land near Fergus Falls, Minnesota, a piece of property his father had bought on the day of Bud's birth in 1917. In the 1970s, Bud built another cabin on a rocky hillside of oaks and hickories near Spring Green, Wisconsin. But it was not just nature that Bud loved; he loved to work in nature. He loved physical labor. He believed that work was not merely a means to an end, but a way of living that contained its own reward. Though Bud's belief that satisfaction must inhere in the task itself, not just in the results of the task, grew from his enjoyment of physical labor, it spilled over into his intellectual labors as well. And it nurblred in him a wonderful mixture of energy and serenity. Whether building a cabin or a school of journalism, restoring a prairie or an Association for Education in Journalism, Bud probably enjoyed the work more than the outcome of it. At the memorial service for Bud in Madison on February 12, the eulogists spoke mainly of Bud's retirement career as environmentalist and his professional career as director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin (1966-75). Bud was remembered fondly for his environmental political work and for his own hands-on effort to re-establish native prairies in Minnesota and Wisconsin. He struggled with lawmakers and with the alien leafy spurge, neither of which had a proper respect for the native ecology of the northern prairie. With his usual zest for both intellectual and physical work, he bushwhacked them both. Bud was also remembered for his national leadership in journalism education. It was Bud who rewrote the constitution of the Association for Education in Journalism in 1964 to create the division system as a way to encourage more attention to scholarly research. He was also president of the AEI in 1966-67. As much as anyone, Bud is the father of the model AEIMC. Even as a scholar of history and law, Bud was more the activist than the ivory tower writer. His major piece of scholarship was Law of Mass Communications, a leading textbook in the field. …