Conversation II

“I just can’t do this,” Nelson told his wife. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to go.”

All that remains of the Nelson family’s business venture is this label (above) and a drawing of the tomato canning plant that closed in 1958.

But if he was looking for a pity party, Sue refused to play host. “Where are we going to go and how are we going to get there?” she asked. And before he could reply, she answered her own question. Returning to the farm was not an option, not now, not ever.

“We don’t have any money and we don’t have anyplace to go. So I suggest you buck up and get back on that horse and ride. We’re not going anywhere!”

Nelson’s major professors, however, did not share his wife’s suck-it-up-and-tough-it-out attitude. Desrosier left for a job with Beech-Nut, pulling the plug on his algae research. Nelson hooked up with Milton Workman, a post-harvest physiologist irradiating potatoes so they wouldn’t sprout. But when Workman left for Colorado State, another research project stopped.

Nelson joked that he was on his way to earning grad student emeritus status when he hooked up with Johan Hoff and started his thesis on the volatile flavor components of tomatoes.

Talk about your perfect fit. At the cannery, Nelson literally grew up around tomatoes. As a boy, his tomatoes, collected as a 4-H project, earned him the title of Tomato King of the Indiana State Fair.

Purdue did not have a food science department by the time Nelson earned his PhD in 1967. The Food Science Institute, as it was known, pulled experts from varied disciplines, including horticulture, animal sciences, agronomy, and ag engineering.

So as diploma day approached, Nelson was busy scheduling job interviews, including one with the University of Minnesota. He also had job offers from four companies.

Sue drove Phil to the Purdue Airport to make his flight to Chicago, where he would connect with a flight to Minneapolis. But mechanical difficulties grounded the plane.

Earl Butz, then dean of the College of Agriculture, was scheduled to be on the first leg of that flight to Chicago.

“I had seen Dr. Butz a couple of times at the Federated Church in West Lafayette and we would shake hands,” Nelson says, “but I sure didn’t think he knew who I was.”

Conversation III

“I can get us a plane at Aretz Airport (a small runway northeast of Lafayette). If your wife can drive us over there, I can get us a pilot to fly us to Chicago,” Butz told Nelson.

Squeezed into the backseat of the single-engine Piper Cub, shouting to be heard, Butz offered this as the conversation icebreaker.

“Why are you going to Minneapolis?”

“I’m interviewing for a faculty position at the University of Minnesota,” Nelson replied.

Butz knew Purdue was in no position to match the financial packages tempting Nelson from the private sector. With no food science department, it would be difficult to even make an offer as appealing as the one Minnesota would soon offer. But Butz knew Nelson was a Hoosier by birth and a Boilermaker by choice. He tried to appeal to his common sense and to his heart.

“There are a lot of great opportunities in academics,” Butz said. “And you can always go into industry later in your career. Once we get back to campus, and before you make any decisions, come and visit me.”

Nelson had already been burned once by industry when the Blue River cannery closed. By now, he and Sue had spent a considerable portion of their lives on the West Lafayette campus.

The view down the Purdue path looked pretty good to the Nelsons. When Butz created a position specifically for him in the horticulture department and offered him an $11,000 salary, the Nelsons dropped anchor in West Lafayette. It was the only home their three children — Jennifer, 49, Andy, 36, and Brad, 32 — ever knew as they grew to adulthood.

His epilogue is yet to be written. Perhaps there is one, or more, of those life-altering conversations in store for Nelson. But like the others, he is not seeking it out. There is too much to do just enjoying life with Sue in their retirement home in northern Michigan.

“My goal right now is to spend more time with my wife and not be as distracted by my work,” Nelson says. “But I do feel that there is something out there that will come along. I just don’t know about it … yet.”

Contact Nelson at pen@purdue.edu