West Bend, WI – This is a short overview of Hope Cross Nelson’s long, active life that I prepared for the Celebration of Hope on Sunday, July 9, 2023, at Regner Park in West Bend. She died December 11, 2022. I am Hope’s oldest child.
Becky Cross Tradewell
Hope Goodwin Hoffman was born on March 27, 1931, in South Amboy, New Jersey. She lived there with her parents, Harold and Lillie Moss Hoffman, and two older sisters in a house with a beautiful, fragrant rose garden in the backyard and a large office where her father kept his collection of elephant statues.
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Harold Hoffman was elected governor of New Jersey for a three-year term that began in 1935. Hope fondly remembered spending summers in the governor’s summer residence on the Atlantic shore in
Sea Girt, New Jersey.
One of the most unusual experiences that Hope had as a little girl was getting to tour the Hindenburg airship in Lakehurst, New Jersey, when she was five. It was luxurious and considered a modern marvel, but the next year, 1937, the Hindenburg famously exploded and crashed attempting to land in Lakehurst.
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As a girl, Hope spent happy times in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on the beach and the boardwalk. The boardwalk had restaurants, candy shops, music, arcades, and amusement rides. She liked to play Skee-Ball and iron claw machines. Among the rides was a large, early Ferris wheel.
Little Hope had a nanny whose boyfriend was a flagpole sitter. The Ferris wheel happened to be close to the flagpole. So, to see her boyfriend, the nanny would take Hope on Ferris wheel rides over and over, which was just fine with Hope!
With these early experiences, it’s no wonder Hope always loved beaches, seafood, carnivals, fairs, parades, festivals, and arcades. Hope’s parents took her to Broadway shows and Dodgers games at Ebbets field in Brooklyn. When she was 9, her father described her as the family sport and said that she was very happy to get the bicycle she had asked for Christmas. She went on to ride bicycles for most of her life.
In high school, Hope wrote for the school newspaper and was a cheerleader. Thanks to my brother Mike finding her yearbook online, we know that she was a member of the physics club, one of the few girls. She was a drummer in the high school band and also in a
combo that played for weddings and other gatherings. She still had her drum set when we were kids, complete with bass drum and cymbals.
As a young woman, Hope led Girl Scout sings. These were sometimes large gatherings and leading them must have taken a lot of confidence and a strong voice. It also contributed to the large and varied collection of songs that she knew and liked to sing to her kids and around the house.
One of the songs did get her into a bit of trouble — she led a group of Girl Scouts in the song about the sinking of the Titanic. It turned out that some audience members were
related to victims of the sinking and they took offense.
Mom also became a lifeguard and later taught her children to swim. Hope went to college at Purdue where she met Bob Cross, who was a year ahead of her in school and was in the Naval ROTC. On June 10, 1951, the day Bob graduated from Purdue and was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy, he and Hope were married. Bob was stationed in Norfolk Virginia.
Hope returned to Purdue, finished her senior year, and graduated in June of 1952 with a degree in child psychology. As a newlywed, it must have been difficult to go back to finish college by herself. I was born in the naval hospital in Norfolk in 1953. Mom used to tell
me that the orderlies, all male, didn’t really trust the new mothers with their babies.
We moved to Madison in 1954, when Dad was assigned to teach naval history in the University of Wisconsin’s ROTC program. Dave was born in Madison, and we got our first dog there, an Irish setter named Bucky.
Dad completed his service in the Navy in 1956. Mom and Dad liked Wisconsin and were happy when he got a job teaching biology at West Bend High School. We moved to a small, white house on Chestnut St. It had a big back yard with a grape arbor and a large
garden with a raspberry patch. Mike was born in West Bend shortly after the move, and Allen, Roger, Priscilla and Sarah followed over the years.
Bob worked on his master’s degree in botany at UW-Madison during summers. The UW had a camp, called the tent colony, for graduate students and their families on the shore of Lake Mendota and our family spent part of five summers camping there, beginning in 1958.
The camp was pretty primitive — no electricity or running water at the wooden platforms. Hope cooked on a Coleman stove and we used kerosene lamps for light. We used an old icebox for refrigeration. There was always a new baby or one-year old for her to take care of. It seemed to me that the most important people visiting the camp were the ice man and the diaper man.
Despite all of the work, Mom enjoyed the tent colony, with the woods and the lake and companionship with other campers. Mom made friends everywhere. There was a weekly community sing around a campfire, which was right up her alley. I have vivid memories of
Mom and Dad singing in the car on the way home from Madison during those summers.
In 1963, our family moved to an old farmhouse with a barn on 10 acres south of West Bend. It had a big garden and plenty of room for kids and animals and Bob and Hope’s annual end of the school year party for the teachers in the district. Dad got us ponies and horses.
Hope loved animals and accumulated many different kinds. She became known as someone who would take in unwanted pets, which helped contribute to the variety, from Guinea pigs, to monkeys, to a parrot named Mac. Mac became an accomplished talker, singer, and
mimic of our mother.
As her children grew, Hope became a Brownie leader, a Cub Scout Den Mother, and then a 4-H leader. In addition to being a Brownie leader, Hope ran a writing contest through the Girl Scout regional council in the 1950s. She met with winners to encourage them to
keep writing. One recipient said that Hope’s encouragement worked, and she kept writing, including recently starting a novel. Hope herself continued to write, including as a part-time reporter for the Sheboygan Press in the 1970s, writing about subjects from Art
Lonergan’s maple syrup operation to Hubert Humphrey’s Wisconsin primary campaign.
Hope was creative and resourceful, but things didn’t always go as planned. One year she was responsible for the decorations for a Cub Scout banquet. She wanted blue and gold balloons, but couldn’t find gold ones. So she began to paint white balloons with gold paint.
There was some kind of reaction that caused the balloons to burst, sending little splashes of gold paint all over the kitchen. She had a good sense of humor, but I think it took her a while to see the humor in that situation.
After we moved to the farm, we all became involved in 4-H and the county fair was a big part of our summers. Mom was superintendent of the food department at the fair for many years. She really enjoyed working with the judges.
Hope was a very good cook herself. Some of my favorites were her fried chicken, Mac and cheese, Manhattan clam chowder, and homemade pizza. You should have seen the kitchen when she made pizza for all of us — pans of every shape and size full of pizza — always anchovy pizza. She was also a great baker of cakes, cookies, pies, and yeast bread and sweet rolls. One year she won first place at the State Fair for her raspberry jelly and another year she won for her butter horns and was interviewed on WTMJ TV by Beulah
Donahue (a local TV celebrity).
Dad died of lung cancer in 1983. Friends and family started the Bob Cross run as a celebration of his life and to raise funds for cancer research. Hope worked on (and felt very responsible for) the run for more than 10 years.
In 1985 Hope married Paul Nelson, also a teacher, who taught the Cross kids physics in high school. After their wedding Hope and Paul generously took his sons and her children, except for Dave who had newborn twins, on a trip to Jamaica, where Roger was in the Peace Corps. It was a wonderful trip.
Not long after she married Paul, Hope was elected to the West Bend Common Council. She served for many years, including a period as Council President.
Hope and Paul traveled widely around the US during school breaks, including driving to Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and North Carolina to visit their children, and to Washington DC for several July 4ths.
After Paul retired from teaching and Hope retired from the common council, they travelled internationally. Their first post-retirement trip was to Scotland (she had Scottish heritage) and Norway (Paul is Norwegian). After that, they traveled to many other countries in
Europe, Central and South America, and Asia.
Hope was a conscientious blood donor, proud of the impressive number of gallons she donated over the years. She was also a painter, mainly of landscapes. One of her paintings was reproduced on the cover of the annual publication of a statewide artist’s
organization. And one year she taught kindergarten.
Hope was active in community organizations, including the West Bend Women’s Club (in her early years in the city) and the League of Women Voters, and volunteered in many capacities in West Bend and Milwaukee. And she made sure that as children we met children with disabilities and people with different backgrounds from our own.
She spoke at many public events, including Memorial Day ceremonies, and made educational presentations in schools, sometimes portraying Belle Case La Follette, the first woman to graduate from law school in Wisconsin and an advocate for women’s right to vote.
Although she held and expressed strong views on sometimes controversial political and social subjects, Hope had friends with many different points of view. She showed real interest in people and treated everyone with respect. As Paul said recently “Hope could talk
to anyone.”
