Turning the Spotlight on Electricity

Editor's Note: Dency Nelson was nominated by a Hermosa Beach Patch reader to be featured in our '' series. If you know of an extraordinary Hermosa resident, send your nominations to jacqueline@patch.com.

Beaming with excitement, Dency Nelson pointed at his Plug In America business card and exclaimed one thing:

"This is my passion," he said while dining at on Pier Avenue. "This is the business card I hand out to people. I don’t hand out my Director’s Guild of America card. I don’t hand out anything that says I’m from Hermosa Beach. This is my real passion because I could speak to how successful it is."

Despite his decades of work as a stage manager on such well-known programs as The David Letterman Show and The Merv Griffin Show, Nelson, a resident of Hermosa Beach for 28 years, identifies himself first as an environmentalist and second as a stage manager. 

Plug In America, which Nelson helped found, is an educational organization that promotes the use of vehicles operating off of renewable electricity.

Nelson’s environmental work has as much as a deep history in his life as his professional career in the variety television business, which he has been a part of for three decades.

What started off as holding cue cards on the set of the original Saturday Night Live in New York turned into a full-time job doing the same thing with the morning David Letterman Show.

"It’s not too much to say that it was life changing for me because even with the Saturday Night Live experience that I had, I didn’t really see that I was going to be happy behind the camera," Nelson, 59, said. "But on Dave’s show, it was everybody’s fantasy of what working on a TV show would be like."

Nelson moved back to California, his home state, in 1983, and soon started acting as stage manager for award shows such as the Grammy, Oscar, and Emmy awards, as well as running the Miss Universe Pageant that had him "running all over the world," he said.

Nelson’s eyes shined as he told stories of becoming friends with Pat Sajak on the set of Wheel of Fortune, but his eyes positively glittered when his passion—environmentalism—was brought up.

Nelson’s eco-friendly mindset started in high school when the inaugural in 1970 was about to kick off.

"I lived in the Bay area, which has a history of free speech and political activism. There I was as senior class president and because I was inclined to embrace environmentalism, at that time called ecology, I had responded to the call for that day," Nelson remembered. "In those days it was primarily focused on not wasting and being aware of litter and pollutants… there really wasn’t anything about alternative energy because there really weren’t any alternatives at that point."

Nelson then attended college to study acting, where he would later end up behind the camera, but he said that his work in television never robbed him of his eco-friendly lifestyle.

Nelson has renovated in the past to be as eco-friendly as possible, and has wired his house to be solar powered.

Then in 2001 Nelson took an interest in the electric vehicles he saw Southern California Edison employees driving around town.

"I wanted one but couldn’t get one because they were only leased to employees," he said. "I started calling to get put on a waiting list and eventually I was the second person in the state to get one of the Toyota RAV4 EVs, and I started to become more and more aware of the growing electric car community."

At the time, the big car industries—Toyota, Honda, General Motors—were all planning on crushing their previously leased electric vehicles in an effort to discontinue their lifespan.

Nelson, along with a group of protestors, picketed Toyota dealers across Southern California in an effort to prevent the company from destroying the last of its RAV4 electric vehicles, an effort that led to Toyota agreeing to stop destroying the vehicles and continue maintenance and support for owners such as Nelson.

From that experience, Plug In America was born.

"We are the largest non-profit electric vehicle advocacy group in the country. I’m not on the board, but I am on the executive committee and among the original founders," Nelson said.

Nelson now hopes to retire from his job in a few years and dedicate all of his time to the environmental cause, he said.

"Electricity is unlimited because when the sources that make electricity are gone, the planet is gone," Nelson said. "They will be around as long as the planet is around; they are completely sustainable, can be harvested cleanly, and with that known, how can you not promote the electric vehicle?"