Don Nichols credits everything that he has done and achieved to his upbringing in Iola. And he’s achieved a lot. “I’ve been blessed, and the blessing was being raised in Iola,” he said. Nichols has been named this year’s City Marshal for the Farm City Days festival this coming weekend.
The 83-year-old former Iolan now resides in Baton Rouge, La., with his wife. “I’ve always lived in Iola in my mind,” he said. He attended Prairie Dell Elementary and then went to junior high and high school in Iola. He was active in 4-H and FFA, which helped direct him to his talent for public speaking. He took this talent and put it into action on the high school debate team.
“After I graduated high school, I attended a small college in Iowa and participated on their debate team,” he said. Following college, he taught debate at Bonner Springs High School for a couple years.
Continuing his education, Nichols decided to get his master’s degree in speech with an emphasis in semantics at Temple University in Philadelphia.
After this achievement, he taught at Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “While teaching there, I got my doctorate degree in human relations and communications,” he said.
Following his time at Broward, Nichols moved to Odessa, Texas, to teach debate at Odessa College. “I was fortunate during my tenure at Odessa to have five national champions,” he said. “We were the first two-year school to be invited to the four-year nationals.”
While working at Odessa College, he simultaneously worked with local attorneys doing witness preparation and jury selection. “A friend and I started a company 43 years ago doing this and I still work with the company,” he said. “In fact, I did my last trial a year ago.”
Nichols said he was fortunate that he started doing this work at about the same time that computers started becoming prevalent. The first company that hired him was Texas Instruments. “They had just received the Kilby Patent,” he noted. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent application called “miniaturized electronic circuits” for his work on a multi-transistor device.
“They said, ‘Nobody knows what a patent is. Nobody knows who Kilby is and nobody knows what integrated circuits are,’” Nichols recalled. “Texas Instruments wanted me to work with them to help their attorneys and witnesses be able to communicate back to a jury. I was one of the first people ever to do it.”
Nichols worked on patents mostly in computer litigation for a number of years and worked for nearly every major company in the United States. “I also worked two years for Ericsson Information in Stockholm, Sweden,” he added.
“Out of that little speech training with FFA and 4-H and the high school speech department, all of this came about,” he said. “I used all of the things I had learned. All of that information and interaction with people started in Iola. Because of this, I don’t feel like I’ve ever not lived in Iola. Physically, I have. But not in my mind.”
AFTER his business took off and he started doing well, Nichols purchased the family farm in Iola following his father’s passing. “We’ve just kind of kept it as the family’s place,” he said. Two years ago, he sold it to his nephew, J.D. Wilks.
“My grandson Christopher owns 36 acres of the farm, so it still has the Nichols name on it,” he added.
Nichols’s sister is Suzy Wilks, who is also being honored during this year’s Farm City Days as the Grand Marshal.
“My sister has always lived on the family farm,” he said.
