- Science Fiction author and cartoonist Ray Nelson was the inventor of the propeller beanie while still in high school. There are varying versions of the story, but the gist is that, in 1947, at a small science fiction convention in Cadillac, Michigan, Nelson and some friends were cartooning, parodying science-fiction icons of the day, and Nelson found some scraps of plastic and attached them to a hat. Soon they became a proudly worn feature of the science fiction crowd.
- In the 1950s, he moved to Paris, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, among others of the Beat Generation. While there, he worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling Henry Miller books out of France.
- His son Walter Trygve Nelson, was born on September 21, 1958 in Paris France.
- Worked for the University of California as a Machine Accountant Assistant.
- He graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Liberal Arts, and earned certificates for wiring IBM machines.
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