Neil Nelson’s senior portrait in the 1951 Long Pointer. [School Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 5538]
Updated on 17 February 2026 | Neil Higgins Nelson’s ambition was to join the Marines, he told his Provincetown High School classmates in the Long Pointer yearbook. (His pet peeve? “Shy girls.”) Neil was a favorite in the Class of 1951, the Advocate reported, and among shoppers at Nelson’s Market, 150 Bradford Street, where he worked for his parents, Clarence M. Nelson and Abbie L. Nelson, who lived at 120 Bradford Street.1
With his nation at war on the Korean Peninsula, Neil enlisted in the U.S. Navy in December 1952. He completed his training at the Aviation Ordnance School in Jacksonville, Fla., the following September and came home to Provincetown for a brief furlough before reporting for duty aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Leyte (CVS-32) with the rank of aviation ordnanceman airman apprentice. He was 20 years old.
Leyte was being converted into an anti-submarine warfare support carrier at the South Boston Annex of the Charlestown Naval Shipyard on 16 October 1953 when the port catapult machinery room exploded. Thirty-two sailors and five civilians were killed in the fiery blast, including Neil and AOAA Fulton Thomas Mountain, whom an obituary in The Boston Globe described as Neil’s “closest Navy companion.”2 A memorial marker with the names of Neil and his shipmates, was dedicated on Constitution Wharf on the Charlestown waterfront in 2001, four days after the terrorist attack of 9/11.
In memoriam
• Neil H. Nelson (1933-1953)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 191421013.
1 “Funeral Today for Neil Nelson,” Provincetown Advocate, 22 October 1953, Page 1.
2 “Neil H. Nelson,” The Boston Globe, 18 October 1953, Page 13.