Oxnard Teacher Remembers Prince as Childhood Best Friend

An Oxnard schoolteacher grew up with Prince in Minneapolis.

Denis O’Leary is a schoolteacher at Rio Plaza Elementary School in Oxnard. He spent several of his childhood years living in the same neighborhood as Prince.

On the day of Prince’s death, he spoke with NewsChannel 3 about some of the memories the two of them shared together.

“That photo was basically a goodbye photo. We were moving back to California and we wanted to remember each other. Roger was my best friend at that age,” said O’Leary as he talked about the photo of he and Prince sitting together in a park.

While the world knows the pop icon as Prince, O’Leary said he always knew him as Roger Nelson.

“We played every sport you could imagine. In the wintertime we played hockey in the streets and on the ice. I am from California originally, so that was always kind of fun. We would play football in the cemetery nearby and we would go play baseball. We were kids,” O’Leary said as he reminisced about Nelson, “I do remember my family and his family we watched the first steps on the moon with Neil Armstrong together on the black-and-white TV.”

O’Leary said he and Prince shared many memories together in their elementary school years, a time before Prince’s life revolved around music.

“It was only years later that I realized that Roger was actually Prince,” said O’Leary. “I do remember an adult coming and giving us a concert on the trumpet once, and I do remember him actually strumming guitar and trying to learn some notes, but he was just beginning at that time.”

After O’Leary’s family moved back to California, he lost touch with Nelson. He said he was shocked to hear his childhood friend lost his life at just 57 years old.

“I had a tear in my eye, because he did spectacular things he was revolutionary in music. He was brilliant, and I was privileged to see him when we were just kids; he was a normal kid, and it is going to be good memories,” said O’Leary.