David Nielsen:
CLASS OF 1970
Reynoldsburg High SchoolClass of 1970
Reynoldsburg, OH
David's Story
Hi All,
Although it's possible, it's not likely that I'll make it back to TomatoTown for a reunion anytime soon, so here's my life in a nutshell - a rather large nutshell. After graduating from RHS, I went to Miami University (along with a few other RHS grads), and earned a B.S. in Geology (1974), with a minor in English, and was fortunate enough to make the Dean's list for 9 out of my 12 quarters (freshman year was really tough!). While there, I joined Chi Phi fraternity and led several memorable spring break and football bowl game expeditions to Florida. Miami was ranked 10th in the nation at the time - higher than Ohio State - and won the Tangerine Bowl and Gator Bowl in consecutive years!. I played on my fraternity basketball and football teams, which won intramural championships, and I also tossed rifles around while on the AFROTC drill team (as a civilian - go figure!), traveling to drill meets all over the country. Then I earned an M.S. in Geology (with honors) from Bowling Green State University, where I also completed ground school and flight school and earned a private pilot's license, qualified in Cessna 150s and 172s. As a Geology Department graduate assistant, I taught undergrad classes and labs, and one of my students was Ken Morrow, who later played on the 1980 US men's hockey world championship team (remember the "Miracle on Ice", in which the US beat Russia?), and for the NY Islanders as a star defenseman. I also played on the Geology Department intramural hockey and basketball teams, which won championships in both sports. What a terrific experience I had at both Miami and BGSU!
Then it was back to Miami for a year of post-grad work, planning on a Ph.D., but ran out of $$, and decided I had to find a decent job to earn enough money to continue school. I worked briefly as a field geologist for the MA Dept of Environmental Management (had an internship in the summer of 1976), mapping the geology of some of the MA State Parks. During my time in MA, I spent many weekends with friends in Hyannisport on Cape Cod - we spent many nights at the Mill Hill Club, where the house band was a local group called "Boston"!! It was also very cool being in the city of Boston during the bicentennial -- especially for the Eagles/Fleetwood Mac/Boz Scaggs concert at Patriots Stadium and the arrival of the Tall Ships in Boston Harbor!
Then I got a real job as a field geologist at the WV Geological Survey (1977-78) and, unfortunately, didn't make it back to school to finish my PhD. I later returned to Ohio to work for a couple of years with OH Dept of Natural Resources Division of Water (1978-80). During this time, I had a brief part-time gig (second job) as a bartender/DJ/bouncer at a disco on Morse Road called Rosie Bottoms (very interesting job -- met a lot of interesting people!) and played on several local soccer teams, winning Columbus and Westerville city championships. Went to the 10-year reunion where I found out there were some big changes for many RHS classmates!
I left ODNR to take a position as Director of Research & Education at the National Ground-Water Association (then in Worthington - 1980-1985). While there, I founded and served as Editor for a major industry professional journal (Ground-Water Monitoring & Remediation), taught dozens of continuing education short courses, organized a few dozen major national and international conferences, conducted many research projects for US EPA, American Petroleum Institute and other organizations, and traveled the world as an industry ambassador. During this time, I also served on the adjunct faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Engineering Extension, and the Wright State University Department of Geology, teaching summer field geology courses at the main campus in Dayton, and spring and fall semester classroom and field courses at the Celina campus. I also bought a great little house in Clintonville, where I had a huge backyard and started a good-sized veggie garden.
While I was teaching an NGWA short course in Boulder, CO in March, 1984, I met my future wife Gillian (a hydrologist/aquatic biologist from Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, eh, and a former star basketball and volleyball player and scholar at Trent University). After several months of correspondence and commuting across the border for both of us, I convinced her to move from Ontario to Ohio late in 1984. We got married in Bar Harbor, ME, and spent our "honeymoon" with friends at nearby Acadia National Park in July 1985 - the lobster dinner at our campsite was fantastic! Together we opened and managed very successful branch offices for two environmental consulting firms, one in Worthington (1985-1987), one in Westerville (1987-1990). We worked at sites all over the US, and spent a lot of our time commuting from Ohio to Massachusetts for the first company, then from Ohio to New York for the other. Then we figured we could spend our time in better ways.......
We decided to go out on our own, and opened environmental consulting and training businesses (Nielsen Ground-Water Science Inc. and The Nielsen Environmental Field School) in May 1990. We moved from Clintonville to Galena, where we had a very cool house in a 7-acre woodlot - a great place to have a huge veggie garden and to begin raising rescued rabbits, which we continue to do today. We wrote and edited 2 successful textbooks (best-sellers for Lewis Publishers and, later, Taylor & Francis Publishers) and I continued as Editor of the professional journal mentioned above. Our businesses were successful enough to allow us to take several long trips to Australia and New Zealand (very cool places to visit - we will go back soon) and the UK, including Scotland, which was excellent. Our success also allowed for a mid-life crisis satisfied by collecting muscle cars, including two first-generation Chevy Camaros (a 1968 convertible and a 1969 RS/SS). Gillian enrolled me in an NHRA drag-racing school (which was awesome!) and, later, a sports-car racing school for my birthday in 1991, and I was absolutely hooked! We sold the muscle cars in early 1992 to start a part-time career in sports-car racing, first racing a 1972 BMW 2002 tii, then a 1996 BMW Z3, then a 2003 BMW Z4 and 2005 Mini Cooper S - I did the driving and wrenching, and Gillian was my crew.
We spent the next 15 years traveling around the country, from Maine to California (and Hawaii), and Florida to Washington (and Alaska), working hard and racing hard. We taught environmental courses in all kinds of venues (including a tribal government courthouse, a bowling alley, and a bar!) all over the country, as well as Australia, Canada, England, Mexico, and Guatemala. We also raced at all of the major road courses in the US and Canada (Sebring, Watkins Glen, Road Atlanta, Road America, Sears Point, Laguna Seca, Mid-Ohio, Mosport, and many others) and many smaller ones. We won many races and finished on the podium in the SCCA National Championships at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course (Lexington, OH) in 2005 (actually televised on ESPN!). After getting wrecked out of a podium position in the Championship race at Mid-Ohio in 2006 (ended up finishing fourth after getting spun out by a competitor), we retired from racing - it became more like a job than fun, and got way too expensive, That same year, our house narrowly missed getting hit by a tornado. Our neighbors down the street weren't so lucky - they lost their houses, but fortunately not their lives. So we started thinking about moving to a pla...Expand for more
ce without tornadoes that had a climate conducive to retirement.
After considering a number of locations, in May 2007 we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, a town of about 95,000 people in the south-central part of the state, where New Mexico State University is located. Yes, New Mexico is an actual state, not part of Mexico, although we are close enough to the border to see mountains in Mexico. Las Cruces is far away from Ohio's crappy weather, and it has provided a better (warmer and drier) environment for work and play, while allowing us to prepare for retirement. It was a big shock moving from the flatlands and the cold, rainy Ohio climate to the high mountain desert, where summer temperatures regularly top 100 degrees (but "it's a dry heat"). We now have a beautiful southwestern-style house, casita (guest house/office) and 5-car garage and workshop on 14 acres at about 5000 feet elevation on the flanks of the Organ Mountains, with our back yard bordering on Organ Mountains/Desert Peaks National Monument. The warm, dry climate, the spectacular views of the Organ Mountains and the Rio Grande valley and the sunsets here are terrific! There are no tornadoes, very little snow (just enough to create some excitement for the locals) and the Mexican food here is absolutely the best!
On the cusp of retirement, in June 2014 we decided to start another business (internet-based environmental training - The Nielsen Environmental E-School) to provide passive income for ourselves. We video-recorded all of our "live" courses and converted them to a distance-learning format. That has worked out incredibly well - environmental professionals from all over the world take our courses on-line, and we just collect money - what could be better? We also got back into collecting muscle cars/sports cars after moving to NM. We had a meticulously restored 1965 Corvette Stingray convertible and a 2011 Chevy Camaro 100th Anniversary Indy 500 Pace Car convertible (both sold in March 2019 to Barrett-Jackson, the famous auto auction company based in Scottsdale, AZ - they wanted them for their showroom!). So, for now we're left with our daily driver (a 2019 Audi Q7 3.0T SUV), a 2014 Corvette Stingray convertible and a 2005 Chevy SSR convertible (we also just sold our 2006 Mini Cooper S convertible, and are looking for a new one) - see a theme?. The gorgeous weather here allows us to drive our convertibles year-round, visiting local wineries (yes, we have great wineries in NM - in fact, it's the oldest grape-growing region in North America!), craft breweries, and National Parks and Monuments. One of the latter, Organ Mountains/Desert Peaks National Monument, is literally in our back yard, and White Sands National Monument is just across the Organ Mountains from us. We also visit other interesting sites of all kinds in NM and the rest of the Southwest, and we take regular drives up and down the American and Canadian Rockies (very interesting stuff for two scientists!). We also sold two other collectible cars back in 2014 - a 1981 DeLorean (think "Back to the Future", but don't think of buying one - they're junk) and a 1976 Pontiac TransAm (think "Smokey and the Bandit").
We also go out to the local reservoirs (one of which, Elephant Butte, is the largest in NM), up into the Sacramento Mountains (to Cloudcroft and Ruidoso) to get out of the heat, and up north to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos to visit the many craft breweries, wineries and great restaurants up there. We have a huge veggie garden with more than 1300 plants, including 18 different varieties of chile peppers (of course - New Mexico is the Chile Pepper Capital of the World!), tomatoes, peas, beans, onions, cucumbers, squash, and other veggies; a huge cactus garden, with more than 30 varieties of cactus; and a big flower garden, which attracts tons of butterflies and many hummingbirds. We are still raising rescued rabbits, as well as feeding a large community of 4 or 5 dozen wild western cottontails and black-tailed jackrabbits and a huge variety of wild birds. Surprisingly, the variety of wild birds out here is much larger than in Ohio -- we're in a major migration flyway, so we see over a hundred different types of birds throughout the year, including about a dozen types of hummingbirds (some only as big as your little finger), golden eagles, roadrunners (the state bird), woodpeckers, sandhill cranes (enormous and very noisy birds) and lots of small songbirds.
Since entering "semi-retirement", we've been spending lots of time vacationing in Playa del Carmen, Cabo San Lucas and Cancun, Mexico, the Caribbean Islands and Costa Rica (we actually learned enough Spanish so we can communicate with the locals when we travel),. In August, 2018, we spent 2 weeks in Iceland, which was absolutely awesome! Volcanoes, glaciers, geysers, hot springs, huge waterfalls, snow-capped mountains, deep fjords, lots of birds and other wildlife, whales and other sea life, and very friendly people - we will go back soon! We are planning to travel in Europe to visit Le Mans, France for the famous 24-hour sports-car race (and a few wineries), visiting wineries in Spain and Portugal, maybe going to a couple of Formula One races in Spain, Germany, Belgium and the UK, and the beaches in the south of France. We also plan to do wine-focused river cruises through Portugal, France, Italy, and Germany (where I'd like to drive the Nurburgring race course, the longest and toughest in the world). In March, 2020, we took a 2-week trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands to check out the Ecuadorean Andes and all of the unique creatures that Charles Darwin chronicled in his tome on evolution in the volcanic atolls of the Galapagos Islands - absolutely spectacular! We plan to spend a lot of time during retirement traveling as much of the world as possible -- definitely back to Iceland and to Australia and New Zealand, and from there to Tahiti and beyond.......
When not traveling, we love relaxing in our pool at home, kicking back with a glass of wine and watching the spectacular sunsets and related color changes on the Organ Mountains, going hiking in the mountains and photographing the local scenery and wildlife, going to the local dirt tracks to watch the locals race, and going to the many local festivals and other events, of which there are many. For example, the White Sands Hot-Air Balloon Invitational, the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the Arizona Strong Beer Festival (and Beer Week) in Phoenix and the CrushBrew Craft Beverage Festival in Scottsdale, AZ, the Las Cruces Salsa Fest, the Taos, Ruidoso and Albuquerque Wine Festivals, the Albuquerque Beer Festival, and the Southern NM Harvest Wine Festival in Las Cruces. We took our first hot-air balloon ride in Albuquerque last summer - what a hoot! We are also registered as students at NMSU (going through student orientation and getting our student IDs again was pretty weird), where we have taken classes in "International Wine Tasting and Food Pairing" "Practice and Economics of Making Wine" and "Brewing Science and Technology for International Beers" (no kidding, these are real classes!). In the wine making class, we made a wine (a Bordeaux Blend) that later won a Silver Medal in the NM State Fair competition (!!), and we have made several other excellent wines (and craft beers) that we enjoy with our friends. Who knows, maybe we'll open a winery or brewery next!
There must be other noteworthy stuff to add, but that will come at a later date.......
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