Meet my Socialist Cowboy Father Nick Nichols–Happy Father’s Day–he would have been 88

“Dads are most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventurers, story-tellers, and singers of song. ”     ~Pam Brown

Prescott “Nick” Nichols 1931-1987

My father Prescott “Nick” Nichols was a socialist cowboy and he was my hero.  Despite (or perhaps because of) being an altar boy as a child, he was not consciously a spiritual man.  He would have maybe said he was an atheist, or at least agnostic.  He was, however, the presence of unconditional love in my life.  Raised riding a horse to highschool in the Southern California desert, he later became a professor of, and the founder of the Comparative Literature Department at San Diego State University.    In a time when this was less likely he taught Prison Literature, Working Class Literature, Third World Literature and Feminist Literature–yes a white man doing all that lol.  He also though played a significant role in initiating collective bargaining for state university professors, particularly working hard to protect part-time professors many of whom were female and/or of color. 
In his spare time he marched against the Vietnam War, picketed supermarkets that were undermining the newly formed United Farmworkers Union and formed and led friends of the Black Panthers in San Diego, and the Democratic Socialists of America chapter. 
He also wrote many plays, The Song of Short-Handled Hoe, Hawks & Doves, Soapbox, as well as adapting several works of Jean-Paul Sartre to the stage.
He married and loved my mother, a gorgeous belle born in the cradle of the confederacy and raised in the segregated south and whisked her off to California in the late 50’s.
One of my favorite comments of my mother on being married to my father, “do you think its easy to be married to Jesus Christ?”  Interesting question.
To me, of course, he was mostly just my Papa.  He taught me to ride a bike, to throw a softball, to body surf, and to play poker and bridge.  When we played poker, we played for keeps and he staked us with pennies.  We learned to say things like “read ’em and weep,” and “the little lady bets.”  For bridge he imparted wisdom too: “there’s many a man in the poorhouses of London who forgot to pull trump,” “fourth from your longest and strongest” or “lead through strength rather than up to strength.”

My father died of a heart attack at the age of 55 in 1987 (Link to his obit in the Los Angeles Times).  My mother Maryann “Lee” Nichols (who is still alive today at 85) later prevailed in a Workers Comp claim against San Diego State University for stress contributing to a heart attack.  It was discovered in that process that the university had deliberately retaliated against my father for his union organizing activities.  I always felt that the stress that really killed him was Ronald Reagan being president. Pa had spent his final middle-aged years protesting the US funded Contra Wars against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

At his death, the students and colleagues petitioned SDSU successfully to name a central quad the “Nick Nichols Free Speech Plaza”– it was later built over as a parking lot.  

Pa also always said, no matter what had happened.  “Don’t worry, honey, it will get better.  This too shall pass.”  And he was right.  Pa, you would have loved President Bernie Sanders.