John Nelson and his life in Eureka.

A biography of the paint store and contracting firm owner John D. Nelson is presented. He was born in Odessa, Minnesota in the early 1890s and attended the Lincoln School in Eureka, California. His jobs as a youth, including delivering papers, painting buggies and cars for Eureka's John Tomlinson auto painting shop and working in a tobacco factory, are discussed. During World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was stationed in San Pedro, California and San Diego, California.