Posted by Cathy Gowdy on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 at 05:49:19 :
San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
A20
'Red' Nelson, San Quentin ex-warden
by Larry D. Hatfield, Chronicle Staff Writer
A memorial service will be held tomorrow for Louis Sander "Red" Nelson, who was involved as a guard and a warden at two of America's most famous prisons during two of the nation's most notorious prison rebellions.
Mr. Nelson died Saturday at Rossmoor in Walnut Creek. He was 91.
Mr. Nelson became a federal penitentiary guard at Alcatraz before World War II, guarding such criminal luminaries as Al Capone.
He then went into the Navy. When he got out, he said, "I was not going back in prison work. I was sick of prisons, as most people were. Then they had the riot on Alcatraz and I just decided that since they were having trouble there, and needed help, I'd better go back and help, even though I had another job lined up."
That decision to return to Alcatraz shaped his life. He worked in prisons until he retired in the mid-1970s.
The riot to which Mr. Nelson referred was a 1946 escape attempt in which two guards were killed, several others wounded and six inmates took control of a cellblock.
U.S. Marines, on their way home from Okinawa, and prison guards from as far away as Leavenworth, Kan., were sent to help retake the prison.
Mr. Nelson was among them. When it was over, three of the inmates were dead; two others were eventually executed. The sixth, Clarence Carnes, known as the Choctaw Kid, had refused to murder several guards he had been assigned to kill; he died in prison in 1988.
In 1948, Mr. Nelson, known as "Red" by colleagues and inmates alike, joined the state Department of Corrections. Over the next 26 years, he served as a guard and associate warden at Lancaster, San Quentin, Vacaville and Sacramento before Gov. Ronald Reagan named him warden at San Quentin.
He was warden during that prison's 1967 race riot and was still there four years later when prison revolutionary George Jackson, two other inmates and three guards were slain in what authorities described as an escape attempt by Jackson.
When attorney Stephen Bingham was later tried for allegedly smuggling a gun into Jackson, the then-retired Warden Nelson testified that he knew of a letter in which Jackson and a former cellmate outlined an escape plan seven months before the August 1971 bloodletting.
He testified in a Marin courtroom that he was sure he must have passed the letter on to guards at the prison but couldn't remember doing so.
Bingham, now a San Francisco attorney, was acquitted.
Mr. Nelson and his San Quentin administration and the radical prison reform movement consistently drew headlines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, blaming each other for prison violence.
During his tenure as warden, Mr. Nelson annoyed other prison officials and won popularity with inmates by walking and talking with inmates unescorted in the yard. It wasn't bravado, he said. "I think it's important to know what's happening."
On his retirement, Mr. Nelson was asked if he would do it again. "No way," he said. ". . . There is no way I would start in prisons and work for the next 33 years."
He also said he didn't see a good future for the system, predicting that prisons would become unmanageable "and I don't want to be around when that happens."
Mr. Nelson was born on a farm in Delmont, S.D., the seventh child of John and Anna Nelson. He was a Marine in 1932, when he met and married Elizabeth Guisti in Hawthorne, Nev.
He spent his retirement fishing, doting on his grandchildren, playing the organ, playing pinochle and public speaking.
Mr. Nelson's son-in-law, Peter Meredith, was a Berkeley police officer for more than 40 years, and his son, Matthew, has been a Berkeley cop for 16 years.
Mr. Nelson's granddaughter, Karen Meredith, is an assistant district attorney in Alameda County.
Mr. Nelson was Past-Exalted Ruler of the San Rafael Elks Club, holding many chapter and state positions in the fraternal organization. He also was active in the Episcopal Church, SIRS and the Alcatraz Alumni Association.
Besides his wife of nearly 69 years, Liz, he is survived by two daughters, Jean Meredith of Walnut Creek and Sandy Mathews of Placerville, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Tomorrow's memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m. at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 399 Gregory Lane, Pleasant Hill. The family prefers memorial contributions to the Charity Fund, San Rafael Elks, #1108, P. O. Box 150789, San Rafael, 94916.
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