Past Years

In 1984 my father, Harold Nielsen, was the treasurer at our church. Right after he retired he told me that he had had enough of spending the entire day on Mondays doing the books and that he was going to put them on a computer. That was a revolutionary thought in those days. Very few people had their own computer. He saw an ad for someone selling an almost new Apple IIe computer and he bought the machine. In a short amount of time he was keeping the books electronically. Getting the computer had another effect. It gave Dad an easy way to write. Young people today might not realize how hard it used to be to get your thoughts down on paper. Dad made a good start, but I've always been disappointed that he didn't finish all of the categories he listed in his introduction. You will read about the Wickstrom farm and South Chicago, but the story stops after that. Dad was a prolific reader. All that reading helped him when it came time to write and the stories collected here are very readable.