So who exactly was Charles Nelson?

THE MAKING OF A WARRIOR

First of all, he was a United States Marine and, as for so many others, his tenure as a Marine would prove to be the defining moment in his life. It was in the Marines that he met Colonel Anthony Drexel Biddle.

Colonel Biddle was an extraordinary person by anyone’s measure. An expert in Close Quarters Combat (CQB), he trained the Marines and the FBI in hand-to-hand combat. He persuaded the Marine Corps to introduce boxing into its training. Renowned for the intensity of his training, he would challenge Marines with their bayonets to attack him unarmed. He also formed a movement known as Athletic Christianity, which at its peak could boast a membership of approximately 300,000.

Colonel Biddle training US Marines, Parris Island, 1942

He was no intellectual slouch either: He held a degree from the prestigious University of Heidelberg in Germany. He was a colorful and inspiring example of that all too often neglected of the gentlemen-warrior, a tradition that hearkens back centuries to, among others, the ancient philosopher Plato in the West and the Samurai and Sun Bi warriors in the ancient East.

Nelson encountered the Colonel by chance one day as the latter was training FBI agents at Quantico, Virginia. Biddle invited the young nineteen-year old to join the class. The hand-to-hand combat techniques and mindset Nelson would learn went far beyond the boxing lessons he had learned at the orphanage. Nelson had chanced upon more than a mere métier. He had found his lifelong calling.

Nelson’s passion CQB training led him to train with a Sergeant Patrick Kelly. Kelly trained with Dermot Michael O’ Neil who had served with the Shanghai Police. The ports of Shanghai were hotbeds of criminal violence and made for an ample testing ground in the finer points of unarmed self-defense. O’Neil later served as a CQB instructor with the legendary William Fairbairn as part of the Office of Strategic Services’ CQB program. (Fairbairn had also served on the Shanghai Police Force, nearly losing his life in a beating dished out by Chinese gang members. He responded by developing one of the most powerful self-defense training programs ever devised.)

If that wasn’t enough training to enable one to survive virtually any street-fight or battlefield encounter, Nelson was briefly a bunkmate in the Marines with John Styers. Styers, as savvy self-defense training students know, is the author of Cold Steel, a classical manual on weapons self-defense training.

In 1942, Nelson found himself with the First Marine Division and embroiled in the legendary Guadalcanal Campaign. There he came face to face with the fragility of human life as the specter of Death passed over him. That experience would teach him to be fearless.

At the World War Two’s end, he returned to New York City with his wife, bounced from one seemingly unsatisfying job to another, and finally set up his self-defense studio in his apartment and over time he established himself as a grandmaster of self-defense training. To this day, he remains a legend in the eyes of experts who know what real self-defense training is about.

Or, to put it another way, those who know the difference between genuine martial arts and sham martial arts.

WHAT CHARLES NELSON’S LIFE CAN TEACH YOU AS A MARTIAL ARTIST

Notice the similarities between Charles Nelson, W. Hoch Hochheim and Kelly McCann. They all have a military or law-enforcement background directly relevant to self-defense training. Their credentials are more or less easily verifiable. Their authority as martial artists and self-defense training experts is grounded in sustained real-time experience with violence. Their curricula vitae are not simply a fistful of black belts awarded and a laundry list of trophies won.

Notice also that there is no mysticism involved in their self-defense training. None of that annoying mystique-of-the-ancient-Orient pretense that infects so many wannabe martial arts instructors.

Instead, their training programs are simple, straightforward, and brutally effective. And because they are rooted in reality they work.

That’s what beginning martial artists or even experience martial artists who feel that something is missing in their training should be on the lookout for as they pursue their self-defense training or martial arts training in general.

What’s next?

The Red and Gray Manuals.

And how they can make you a better martial artist.

Self-defense experts made pilgrimages to his studio.  Major self-defense instructors and martial artists like Carl Cestari, Brad Steiner, Professor “Vee” Visitacion and Bob Kasper traveled to learn what the studio’s owner had to teach.

Charles Nelson was his name. Except for those truly committed to self-defense training, he is largely unknown among most martial arts circles. That is a shame because Charles Nelson even in his declining years knew more about self-defense training than most black belts from commercial schools could ever hope to know.

To make a confession, one of my true regrets in my pursuit of the martial arts is that I never made the pilgrimage to Charles Nelson’s School of Self Defense.

I had seen his advertisement in the Yellow Pages in the 70’s. It was a modest, unassuming ad featuring a cobra and a mongoose circumscribed within a circle. “What kind of mandala is that?” I wondered. The headline simply said Charles Nelson’s School of Defense and gave its address. Nothing more.

I was living on the Upper East Side and Queens during those years and making the trip across town was inconvenient. Worse, I was still bewitched by the mystique of the Asian martial arts. I wanted a black belt. Like so many others, I had invested the concept of the black belt with a near-mystical aura of invincibility. I was still looking for some Korean or Japanese grandmaster who would bestow upon me the esoteric secrets of self-defense as I undertook the journey to become a black belt. Charles Nelson’s school, if I recall correctly, had no belt ranking system.

It seemed all too pedestrian for a young man harboring grandiose (indeed, quasi-delusional) thoughts about self-defense. Alas.

Fool that I was I never made the trip to his studio. I still kick myself for not doing so.

So what, anyhow, was Charles Nelson’s secret?

What made law-enforcement officers, soldiers and sailors, celebrities and working-class guys and gals alike flock to his studio?

I’ll give up the answer in tomorrow’s post.