Dwight A. Nelson was born in Carson Valley in 1911. He has been a teacher, restaurant worker, politician, and the chief juvenile probation officer for Washoe County, Nevada.

His concern for and interest in people, which is indispensable to probation work, is revealed when he talks about his family, boyhood, and university friends. It is still clearer when we read of his becoming a teacher, and of teachers' problems in rural Nevada (Minden, Lovelock, Ely and Fallon). He is proud of the success which has come to many former pupils, but he doesn't imply he deserves credit for their accomplishments. On the contrary, he credits the parents and the Nevada environment.

Dwight Nelson feels that working for his father in the Waldorf Restaurant in downtown Reno was involvement with people, but of a different kind than teaching. This was also a valuable preparation for his career in juvenile probation. He became the Washoe County probation officer for juveniles in 1949, and he developed the present extensive and modern operations and facilities from that one-man office beginning. He dealt with wholly inadequate resources of all kinds: the necessity of jailing children before the construction of Wittenberg Hall, a chronic shortage of staff, the hard necessity of refusing to send children to the boys' facility at Elko until it was improved so that human treatment and some protection from homosexual rape was provided.

Nelson's job was made more difficult by many who thought it useless to attempt to work with young offenders. They believed in simple solutions, such as "get tough, lock them up." He worked to achieve acceptance of a philosophy based on the knowledge that locking them up was a proven failure; that it only resulted in the same children returning as a greater threat to the community. He showed most of his detractors that the best way to protect the community was to help the child.