Herschel Nix

by Denise Nix

Gardena, CA

When Herschel Nix started the first grade, he was 8½-years-old and towered over his younger classmates.

It wasn't long, however, until the principal of the two-room brick schoolhouse realized that Herschel surpassed the other first graders not only in height, but in his ABCs and 1-2-3s, too.

While Herschel advanced through the first three grades quickly and began the next semester in the fourth grade along with kids his age, those first few days in the first grade stayed with him a long time.

"When I started school in the first of January, the teacher had me stand up and she said: 'Boys and girls, we have a new member in our school, in our grade today - Hershey Chocolate Bar.'

"… You know what happened: everybody called me old Hershey Chocolate Bar, and I was, talk about green," Herschel says.

His teacher, though, got what was coming to her, Herschel recalls with a laugh, noting that her name was "Mrs. Snoddy."

This was 1923 in the panhandle of Texas, where life for young Herschel was a balance of schoolwork, athletics, farming, family duties and, once in awhile, a little bit of fun.

Herschel lived with his mother, Zoe, his grandfather, Fred Bidwell, and other family members. He never really knew his dad, who his grandfather would run off with a shotgun when he dared to come around.

Zoe and Herschel's father were divorced when Herschel was six months old. His father, a barber, eventually remarried and moved to Eastland Texas.

Herschel and his family lived in a ranch house, the old Grimsley Ranch, up on the salt fork of the Red River, about eight miles north of Hedley, Texas - an area he refers to as the chinery (a scrub oak) country and sage brush country.

Zoe mostly helped Herschel's grandfather with the livestock and fields, which grew cane and watermelons, and, one year, cotton. His Aunt Fern took care of the house and Herschel, and was responsible for his home schooling and, later, his studying, which kept him on par with his peers.

"I did real well in school because (of) Aunt Fern…" Herschel says. "Mother worked in the field, to see how grandpa ran the ranch, and Aunt Fern run the house and did the cooking and tutored me and she was a wonderful, wonderful person."

There was no running water or electricity at the house, and it could get cold out on the plains, especially when "those northerners come in," Herschel recalls.

The family would bring a wagon-load of coal from Hedley to get them through the winter, but getting water from a windmill located through a grove of trees about two blocks long, especially during the frequent sandstorms, could be a treacherous experience.

"We had a No.9 wire, that's a heavy-duty wire, and we had it strung from the house down to the windmill," Herschel says, his Texas drawl now a combined with a Missouri accent.

Once Herschel was old enough to bear the responsibility of fetching water, Aunt Fern would cover his head with a pillowcase to protect his face from the blowing sand.

"I'd hold on to that wire all the way down to the windmill to get a bucket of water and I'd hold on to it all the way back….

"Boy, I'll tell you, those sandstorms were horrendous," Herschel says, adding that they would sleep with a sheet over their faces, then have to shake the dirt off when they got up in the morning.

Life on the farm involved a lot of work. For a while, they grew corn and a hard melon, called pie melon. Both of these went to feed the cattle, who especially liked the melon. "Boy, that was candy bars to those cows," Herschel recalls. "They loved that."

Also living at the ranch was Herschel's Uncle Frank, his mother's brother who was about 10 years older than Herschel. Herschel remembers Uncle Frank as a "prankster" who one time put shotgun powder in his grandfather's pipe.

Every night, Herschel's grandfather read the Ft. Worth Star Telegram by the coal stove while smoking his pipe. After he smoked it, he would set it on the window.

Uncle Frank got hold of the pipe, knocked out the tobacco and put the powder in it. When Herschel's grandfather lit the pipe, it ignited, Herschel laughs, remembering how he and his Uncle Frank watched through a window.

"It's a wonder he didn't burn the … house down," Herschel says with a chuckle.

When Herschel was about 10 years old, they moved to a little house on the highway that was closer to Hedley. Uncle Frank became a barber and Herschel worked in the fields, taking pride in the cotton and watermelon crops he helped cultivate.

"So when the watermelons were ripe, we loaded the wagons and brought those watermelon into town by the wagon loads," Herschel says. They set up next to the highway and people would stop and buy them for 50 cents each.

"Back in those days, that was quite a bit. Boy, they were delicious watermelon."

Zoe remarried when Herschel was 12-years-old, to Walter Coester, a man she had corresponded with who lived in Kansas.

Herschel remembers the strange way he found out about Walter:

"I was out playing over with the Edwards kids and she called me home - I was at the people's across the street from us - and I came home and here was a perfect stranger.

"And she said: 'Now, this is Walter Coester and we are going to get married this afternoon … and in the morning, we're gonna pack up and we're all gonna go to Kansas.'

"Well, that was news to me. I didn't even know they had been writing to each other, see. So the next morning, we get up, and I didn't even get to tell the Edwards kids goodbye or anything, I was so tore up, I didn't go over there. I thought, sure she was kidding when she said we were gonna leave for Kansas.

"But the next morning at daylight, we were on the road and headed for Kansas. Everything we had we had packed in a four-door Chevrolet sedan."

It was 1926 and they were living in Walter Coester's house in Brazilton, Kansas, along with Walter's three children, Eileen, Leland and Marvin.

Herschel remembers Walter as a decent man, but with a tough hand in disciplining him and his stepsiblings. Herschel didn't get along with Walter, mostly because he was also in constant battle with Leland, who was close to his age.

Herschel remembers the Coester kids treating him "like dirt" when they were younger, except for Marvin, who he said always stood by him.

This was especially hard because he also was constantly on the outs with Zoe.

"Mother was the best step mother in the world and she loved all those Coester kids and they loved her because you couldn't have asked for a better stepmother, or a worse mother," Herschel recalls.

After Zoe died in the late 1970s, her other sister, Aunt Jessie, who they called Aunt Jack, asked Herschel what went wrong in his relationship with his mom.

"I told her that she wasn't a mother to me … that she had taken after my family and just made life miserable for them, too, which was true," Herschel said, referring to a time later in his life when he was married to Maywood and they lived in Oklahoma.

His stepsiblings, who were listening to this conversation with his Aunt Jack, completely turned around after that, Herschel says. He corresponds with them frequently now and they are a part of his life.

After moving to Kansas, Herschel attended a little one-room schoolhouse about a block from their house. That school is still standing today, painted bright red and housing the 4-H Club center.

There were nine students in the school. It wasn't long until Herschel and Leland graduated and attended Hepler High School.

The family owned a 1923 Ford Model T that Leland and Herschel drove to and from school, often giving rides to a friend of theirs that lived nearby, Clarence Tam.

One time, Herschel and Clarence got in a fight, causing Leland, who was driving, to run in a ditch on their way home from school.

"Tipped the … thing over on its side, and a farmer come along with two guys … and we got behind it, tipped it over and drove off down the road," Herschel says. "Clarence and I never did finish our battle."

Herschel had four classes that first year of high school, but he flunked three of them. The only subject he passed, and liked, was English.

Herschel remembers that time as difficult: "I was mad at the world and mad at everybody in it and then, all of the sudden, I told myself: 'Old buddy, that if you're so unhappy and so miserable, if you ever want out of this situation, you've got to graduate from high school.'"

The next year, Herschel enrolled in six subjects, and carried extra classes through the end of high school, graduating with extra credits. He also became involved in more activities, including glee club, mixed chorus and school plays.

His height made him eligible for basketball, but because they played at night, Herschel could not participate. "I had to go home and feed those … cows, so I missed that." He did get to play football, though.

Herschel was the only one at his school that owned a football helmet and shoes, but he can't remember how he got them.

He got along well with the coach, Joe Skubitz, who later served Kansas in the U.S. House of Representatives. Back then, Skubitz was doing work at his alma mater, Kansas State College in Pittsburgh, and since Herschel had a car and knew how to drive (some people still came to school on horseback), he asked Herschel to drive him there.

Skubitz also liked to have fun, and caused quite a laugh riot at a diner where the team went after a big game. He pulled out a hair and put it in his pie, then called the waitress over to complain. They all "got a big bang" out of her reaction when Skubitz confessed to the joke.

While football could be a dangerous sport, it becomes even more hazardous when tornadoes are thrown into the mix. This happened one time during a game against Hepler's archenemy. Herschel remembers he looked up and saw a twister headed right for them. It turned out, he was the only who had seen a tornado before and, remembering how dangerous it was, he tried to convince his fellow players to seek shelter in the nearby coal bin that had a concrete top.

"They laughed at me and called me a coward, and I stood on the steps of that … coal bin and watched that … tornado come up within a block," He says. Everyone stood there with mouths' hanging open, and the twister lifted, went over a mile and dropped again, sparing all of them.

"So I had seen a tornado and knew what they were, so at that high school deal, I wouldn't have stood out there and been blown away," Herschel says. "If that … thing hadn't lifted up, it would have killed everyone of them."

Legacies