Eye doctor Russell Nielsen captured life through different lenses

Russell A. Nielsen, a local optometrist with a wiry figure, wasn’t known to be very athletic.

It surprised his son, then 12 years old, when Russell showed up for a canoe trip down the Cedar River with his Boy Scouts troop. As the two traveled downstream, Russell watched the paddles move back and forth, interested in the way they propelled the boat.

“I found out later that he’d gone to the library somewhere and found books on how to canoe because he’d never been before,” said Ron Nielsen, now 63. “Apparently he was just destroyed for days afterwards — back aches, sore. I think it was one of the very few times he ever might have missed a day of work.”

Russell died May 12 from COVID-19 at The Deery Suites at Western Home Communities in Cedar Falls. He was 96.

The canoe trip was a rarity. Russell mostly saw his kids at dinnertime, staying late at his office and working Saturday mornings. He let his three children — two daughters and one son — drive with him Thursday afternoons to pick up glasses at the lab.

He worked as an optometrist with his uncle, with home he grew close as a boy. The two had a practice in Cedar Falls together, and when his uncle retired, Russell took over and moved locations in town. He got his bachelor’s and optometry degrees from Illinois College of Optometry.

To his kids, Russell was a quiet man. To his clients, he never stopped talking.

Classmates would tell Russell’s kids about their visits to his office for eye appointments.

“They would always tell me, ‘Boy, he just talked my ear off! You couldn’t believe how talkative he was during the examination, back and forth in discussion,’” Nielsen said. “Here, we hardly heard a peep out of him at home.”

His daughter Julie Nielsen Wolf, 68, figured her dad was “talked out” by the time he got home. She described him as an old-school doctor who stayed with patients during their entire visits, helping them pick out the perfect pair of eyeglasses.

Outside of the office, Russell peered at the world through a camera lens, capturing family vacations and more. He was part of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Camera Club. His interest began after his mother bought a box camera in the early 1900s. Growing up on a farm, Russell lost his mother to an illness at a young age.

As an only child who mostly spent time alone with his own father and their housekeeper, Russell especially came to love family gatherings with his aunts, uncles and cousins. He made sure to document their get-togethers with his camera.

As a child, Wolf recalls nights huddled in the living room with family, turning the lights off and looking at photo slides. It would take up entire evenings.

“He always made sure we all had cameras, and there was very little we didn’t take photos of,” Wolf said. “There was seldom a time that we didn’t have a camera along if we were going some place.”

Perhaps even more than taking photos, Russell spent his time nourishing fruit and vegetable plants to feed his family, ranging from asparagus to rhubarb.

“I remember that because they weren’t my favorites,” Nielsen recalled. 

But there were occasional gems in the backyard of their Ninth Street house, built in the mid 1950s. Nielsen would make his way to the raspberry bushes, picking off the sweet red fruit as a treat.

“To this day, if I get a raspberry from somewhere, my wife puts them on a salad or we have them here, every bite I take vividly brings back that memory of having fresh raspberries in my dad’s garden,” he said.

Russell’s love for growing plants stemmed back to his upbringing, when he would grow bushels of cucumbers, walking them to the Main Street pickle factory for cash.

His daughter, 55-year-old Kristin King, enjoyed accompanying Russell to local greenhouses, searching for the best plants at low prices.

Before having children, Russell served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, with supervisors entrusting him to teach pilots how to use radars and other electronics.

He graduated from Iowa State Teachers College High School in Cedar Falls in 1941, and went on to attend Iowa State Teachers College, which is now University of Northern Iowa. Though he had no real background in teaching, but rather took general courses, Russell took on his assigned educational post.

“They said, ‘Oh, he’s from a teacher’s college, he must be good at teaching. We could have him helping instruct all the pilots,” Nielsen said. “I thought that was interesting that he had gone through that path through a misunderstanding of where his background was.”

In the military, Russell’s technical interests led him to explore radios, and he eventually built his own phonograph.

He gave his undivided attention to his children on vacations, sometimes one or two weeks at a time. They hiked up mountains and found themselves shivering in tents in Colorado snow. He bought them each a thoughtful gift for Christmas.

Russell was a man with a simple appetite, who seldom drank alcohol and always wore buttoned shirts. He did all the grocery shopping for his wife, Wanda, the talkative one of the pair. She died in 2018.

“He was probably the only man in the grocery store in Cedar Falls with coupons, and he had them rubber banded to his checkbook,” Wolf said. “He was a bargainer.”