Expert Trespasser, Folk Dancer, and Math Extrordinaire
Bill Nelson has managed to be a master folk dancer, one of the most wanted (yet unorthodox) high school teachers, and an unprecedented bookseller, all while embodying his life philosophy of minimalism.
As I sit down with Bill on the same porch he uses to display his books, multiple passers-by stop to say “hello.” One man, a former Reed student, almost sounds nervous as he talks to Bill, as though he’s a celebrity.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you on campus,” the alumni said, “It’s surprising though to not see any books around you. Will you be around tomorrow? If I see you tomorrow then I’ll be happy.”
Bill graduated Grant High School in 1958 and developed an unconventional approach to learning that was perfect for Reed.
“It’s all about the questions,” he explains. “And that’s largely lacking in education. I remember teachers telling me ‘why do you always have to do something different than the way I show you’ and I’d say ‘I’ve always felt that I can come up with a better way of doing a problem, at least for me.’ There were teachers that would be upset about it. They pride themselves in teaching how to do it, and then you have someone that doesn’t do it their way and they take it personally. So, you can find yourself not getting the best grade you would’ve received had you remained quiet. But that wasn’t an interest of mine anyway.”
Bill’s story largely begins at Reed. Like many new students, he experienced a bit of a shock once he arrived. The reading and papers proved more challenging than expected, but most surprisingly, math was actually difficult.
“I was learning the mechanics of math and Reed is all about proofs—about understanding—not just being able to whip out an algorithm, about understanding why what you solved is right,” he said.
Chemistry was the easiest class for him, and he ended up choosing it as his major largely because of one particular book.
“My life has been very much dictated by books,” he said, “Linus Pauling’s The Nature of the Chemical Bond—the first book of chemistry to focus on understanding why matter behaves the way it does by looking at the molecular and atomic structure. It was fascinating to me.”
But much like today, school wasn’t all work and no play. Bill became part of what was nearly the sole social outlet at the time: folk dancing.
“If you didn’t folk dance,” he said, “you didn’t have a social life; you spent all your time in the library, which isn’t very healthy.”
The group danced every Wednesday from 7:00 p.m. to midnight, but Fridays really weeded out the weak. They danced until the next morning and would head over to the Original Hotcake House on Powell for an early breakfast.
Bill’s folk dancing career didn’t end after graduation.
“In the summers when the campus was closed,” he recalled, “I started going up to Washington park on my motorcycle with a backpack full of records and a record player strapped to the back and I’d, at night, get into the electrical system. It was funny, really. [The electrical system had a huge padlock], but the door that the padlock was on just had four little screws. If you took the screws out, the door would open. I’d hook up my record player and put music on. People would come down and I’d teach them some dances. I did that twice a week and people started coming regularly and pretty soon I’d have a huge group of people waiting for me each time.
“I did that surreptitiously for a couple years and then one morning I got a phone call from the superintendent of the park bureau and he said, ‘I’ve received letters from all over the world, complimenting me on having such a wonderful dance program available to the public.’” He then hired Bill as the director of folk dancing for Portland and eventually provided him with a facility to teach classes Fulton Park Community Center.
During his time at Reed, Bill also became involved in the student organizations on campus. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emerged in 1960 to give African American students equal representation and two years later another group was created, Students for a Democratic Society. Both needed funds, so Bill and other students organized used book sales. “When those two kind of died out, I just continued the used book sale.” Because most of the books were Bill’s, they set up a spot in the SU.
“Students could buy them any time,” he said, “It was the honor principle.”
As time passed, Bill found he loved providing books for Reedies and continued to bring his Volkswagon bug and small trailer full of books to campus.
“Having the students just appreciate my efforts and share the love of books and an interest in ideas was very reinforcing,” he said, “Also it paid for my, sometimes expensive, habit of collecting books.”
Orientation, which used to last two or three weeks, was Bill’s favorite time of the year. He would place boxes filled with books near paths between the dorms and commons, which was irresistible to students.
“I don’t think a student ever got past without finding something,” he claimed.
Eventually, Bill decided to try to venture out of Reed and sell books at another college campus: Lewis and Clark.
“Before I was there very long (although the students were pretty enthusiastic), an administrator came out, a very fiery woman, was irate that I be on the campus and was going to call the police,” he recalled, “She took me to her boss, who was head of the college activities, not knowing that he was a good friend of mine (he and I did Greek dancing together). So nothing really came of it, but he said I couldn’t [come back]. Their campus wasn’t quite so open. Most schools are pretty bureaucratic and Reed didn’t even have a security force then.”
Despite the assumptions some may make about the used book business, Bill still finds it exciting.
“I’ll often ask them why they picked that book,” he said. “I’ve had students who I’ve known for four years who have bought many books from me and I think what they must be studying and I’m always wrong. They buy all these books and it turns out, they’re a math major or physics or religion major, but they’re just very interested in mythology or other topics, which is great. It’s one of the benefits of a liberal education.”
Over the years, Bill has accumulated tons of books. They come from all sorts of places: used book stores, Powell’s on Hawthorne, his time as a Goodwill volunteer, and countless other crafty sources, but many of the books he sells to this day are from his personal collection. Even though Kindles and other reading devices are becoming increasingly popular, Bill insists that used books trump all, including new books, with their unmatchable aesthetics.
After Bill graduated from Reed, he went to Brown University to study mathematics and then returned to Oregon to teach high school in Eastern Oregon, where his teaching style began to develop.
“I devoted the first 10 minutes of every class telling students about books I read,” he recalled, “and then bringing them or other books by the author into the classroom for the students to take. That was very upsetting to parents. [They’d say], “What’s a math teacher talking about philosophy and literature?”
But Bill’s unusual teaching style didn’t stop there.
“I would introduce a problem, write it on the board, and then sit down, he recalled. “I wasn’t interested in telling them what to do, what to learn, I was interested in creating the problems or questions that would lead the student to their own world of inquiry. Then I’d call students up one at a time and see what they were doing, make suggestions, hopefully praise them for doing something interesting, and have them go back. I wasn’t interested in the answer; I was interested in what questions they came up with, to get them to realize that they can actually understand things themselves without being told. It was very controversial and very unorthodox. It still is, unfortunately.”
After a few months, the principal asked Bill for a letter of resignation to resolve complaints from parents, but Bill didn’t want to be cowardly and asked for a town meeting instead. The principal obliged.
“I remember arriving and I saw this line of cars, and they were all the same car, different colors, but all Cadillacs. I realized this little town was full of wealthy wheat ranchers. I explained my background and what I was trying to do and then I opened it up to questions and I soon realized the reason they were so upset were two things: one, I didn’t give A’s because of Reed. If you learned all the material well, it was a C. If you went beyond that, to greater depth and understanding, you got a B, and an A was really, really reserved as something grand. I realized soon after being confronted that that was a mistake and kind of unfair. Reed in many ways is unfair because the grading is so unlike other schools. The one class I had serious trouble with at Reed was German. I [then] took second year German over the summer at Lewis and Clark and I got an A+.”
Bill then was moved back to Portland and was offered a position at the wealthy, suburban school, Lake Oswego Senior High, which had just been recognized as an outstanding high school in America.
“I walked into a boardroom for the interview: superintendent, assistant superintendent, principal, vice-principal, head of the math department, and a couple others were there,” he said “I felt like I was interviewing for the CEO of Ford motor company. After I left, the principal came running out and said, ‘Bill this has never happened before, we all agree. We’ll give you a contract right now.’”
This was an offer Bill couldn’t pass up, but it turned out to be what Bill called a disaster. In the first few months, students continually transferred in and out of Bill’s class to accommodate their extracurricular activities. His unique curriculum made these transitions difficult to the point that the principal told Bill that every teacher needed to be on the same page. But this didn’t sit well with Bill.
“I didn’t have a page, I didn’t use a book, he recalled. “The first thing I did was toss the books out. I wasn’t interested in students just mindlessly learning what was in the book. I wanted them to think. For example, I would spend two months on the Pythagorean theorem. I wanted every student to create their own original proof. I wanted them to really see and understand. That all came out of Reed. I don’t think [that would’ve happened] if I had gone to a regular college or university.”
Even though his teaching methods shocked some, Bill managed to gain the approval of most of his students to the point of many following him when he switched schools. To this day, he is still friends with former students.
In addition to his uniquely in-depth teaching style, Bill also lives a uniquely minimalist life. Contrary to the American way of what Bill calls “having more and being less grateful,” he strives to get by with extremely little and greatly appreciate what he does have.
He claims that there are two ways of achieving freedom: making a lot of money and being self-sufficient.
“I thought it would be much more interesting and more creative to lead a life where you figure out how to do everything yourself,” he said, “and you live on just what you can do, what you make, and what you can fix. It’s a source of enjoyment.”
Bill’s life philosophy of minimalism was brought to a higher level with the purchase of his house, the oldest one in Beaverton.
“I liked the idea of owning property—just to be free and to be able to grow my own food,” he said “The freedom of being able to do what I want—change the roof, put in a skylight.”
So, he bought a six-bedroom house for $8,000 and converted each one into a library with floor to ceiling shelves. In accordance with his quest to achieve self-sufficiency, he traded the house’s furniture (another mere $100) for about 8 wood stoves. To this day, he has never paid for heating.
With such low living costs, Bill retired in 1969. He continued to sell books to Reedies and even helped some furnish their houses with finds from the city dump.
“We’d go there at night and they had a fence with a huge padlock, not realizing you could lift the post up,” he said, “So we’d load up furniture, refrigerators, all this stuff that people were throwing away.”
Through the city dump, rummage sales, and other virtually free sources, Bill spent hardly any money on furniture and clothes and managed to save much of his income. He has also worked over the years to tackle another potential expense: food.
For decades, Bill has grown as much food as he can in his garden, but he also used to shop once a year at the docks. He would buy 100 pounds of short grain rice, 100 pounds of soybeans, 100 pounds of split peas, and a couple hundred pounds of potatoes. Although, he does buy a few ingredients, like cheese and eggs, from the store.
Bill also prepares his meals in a similarly minimalist fashion. He skips breakfast and for lunch eats a milkshake (sweetened with banana or apple, not ice cream), toast, an egg, potato, and some vegetables. Then for dinner he has a sandwich. While most people might get tired of such a narrow diet, Bill insisted, “The primary enjoyment for me is that I’m doing it myself.” Apart from the occasional formal dinner for his wife’s work, Bill never eats out.
At this point in his life, Bill feels pretty confident in the level of minimalism he has achieved, but he admitted, “I’m in the process of eliminating the one thing in my life that is very indulged in: books.”
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Trask by Don Berry—the outgrowth of a Reed thesis
Ask him about: Chemistry, math (especially number theory), the Israeli dance club he’s trying to bring to Reed, how he is somewhat responsible for the existence of Powell’s, and of course, books.