Edward Nelson, who as a boy took apart everything he could get his hands on but couldn’t always get everything back together, grew up to work for the company of his dreams: Deere & Co., the giant Moline, Ill.-based farm and industrial implement manufacturer.
Over a 36-year career, he came up with the ideas and the know-how to build machines that are the stuff of little boys’ dreams: the front-loader backhoe, the tree harvester and a complex device that helped drag trees from the forest.
Mr. Nelson, 80, former manager of market development, who held patents on the tree harvester and the forestry device, died of complications from a stroke Saturday, Jan. 11, in Trinity Medical Center, Rock Island. He had lived in Moline since 1969.
In 1940, Mr. Nelson enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Australia and the Philippines. Afterwards, Mr. Nelson, who was born in Atmore, Ala., earned a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from Auburn University.
He began his career at Deere in 1948. A modest man, Mr. Nelson never claimed that any of the innovations were his alone, even though he came up with the notion for the tree harvester in the backwoods of the Deep South.
The tree harvester is no longer in production, but in the 1970s it was revolutionary. In one fell swoop, the harvester cut down the tree, sheared off its limbs and rolled it onto the logging truck.
“It eliminated a lot of the manual labor associated with this hot, humid work,” said Jane Hensel, his daughter. “I think that was the one thing he definitely was pleased with. He actually had come up with the idea back in the backwoods. It was a long time before it ever came to fruition.”
For his grandsons, anything John Deere that made their eyes sparkle, especially the front-loader backhoe, which Mr. Nelson had an integral part in designing.
His daughter remembers the Christmas Eve when her father finally passed on a John Deere tractor to one of his grandsons.
“You should have seen him and [her husband] Andy in the basement, with a million pieces all over the floor, and Dad just has the brightest eyes, and he is just loving life that he is going to give his grandson his first John Deere tractor,” Hensel said.
It was Mr. Nelson’s love for big machines that led, in a roundabout way, to the greatest love of his life–Reba, his wife of 53 years.
Mr. Nelson had just started work at the company in September 1948, when a tractor seat fell on his back, and he was hospitalized for six weeks in a full body cast.
Before the accident, he had been given tickets to the Hospital League Follies and had planned to take Reba Evans, to whom he had just been introduced. He called her from his hospital bed to say that he would like to give her the tickets to go with someone else.
She took the tickets and also took to visiting Mr. Nelson for the rest of his hospital stay. They married in June 1949, “and they were in love those whole 53 years,” his daughter said.
Mr. Nelson also is survived by another daughter, Martha Ryan; and three more grandchildren.
Services will be held at 10:30 a.m. Friday in College Church, 332 E. Seminary Ave., Wheaton.
