We just had a successful campaign to raise money via Kickstarter to send our actors to the World Premiere of our film The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg at the Dances With Films: Los Angeles film festival on June 27, 2026. One of our donors was Bonnie Nielsen, a psychiatric Nurse Practitioner and spouse of Tore Nielsen, M.D., my father’s partner in their psychiatric practice in Olympia, Washington.
My father was the first psychiatrist in all of Southwest Washington, with his office in Olympia. He would see patients throughout the area, including the towns of Aberdeen and Raymond. One of his patients paid him by allowing us kids to pick chanterelle mushrooms on his forested property, which are edible and taste great with pasta.
My father came to Olympia in about 1962, a year after I was born in Topeka, Kansas, and Tore joined him a year or two later. They visited us at our house on Fishtrap Road, in a rural area on the Puget Sound outside of Olympia. This was our house, in a Japanese style.
Tore K. Nielsen, M.D. (1934-2020) was born in Drammen, Norway, and grew up in the midst of World War II, where he family was involved in the resistance to the Nazis. As a teenager he emigrated to the US where he attended Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington, Pacific Lutheran University for college, and medical school and residency at the University of Washington.
Bonnie Nielsen, N.P., and Tore K. Nielsen, M.D., with one of their grandchildren.
During the Vietnam War, he was Neuropsychiatry Chief of Medical Corps Reserves at the 50th General Reserve Hospital at Fort Lawton and later Fort Lewis (1962-1969). He was chief resident at both the VA and University Hospital. He was an associate clinical professor at UW School of Medicine, and published papers “Alcoholism and Suicide” and “EEG and Juvenile Behavior Patterns.” Tore met his future wife, Bonnie, a psychiatric nurse, at the UW Medical School Hospital. They married in Montana and moved to Olympia, Washington, in 1964, where they welcomed and cherished their four children, Julie (Mark Japhet), Todd, Brad, and Lisa (Robert Spieler).
