Sedgwick county’s first school house, year 1890. Indian encampment along the Arkansas river, year 1879. Jones Motor Car factory manufactured from 1914 to 1921 in Wichita.

In 1863, Jesse Chisholm opened Wichita’s first business, a trading post.

Just five years later, in 1868, the settlement along the Arkansas river known as Wichita had grown to 30 residents. By 1870, that figure had leaped to 689.

These early years were tough times, but Wichita’s history is a story rich with men and women of strength and determination.  Many of the early settlers arrived with very little.  While others had money, housing was scarce. It was common for families of different names to be living under the same roof.

Disease, drought, floods and grasshoppers plagued the early settlers, but through it all, they stood fast.

And built. And developed.

They built churches and ...

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The young men attending Nick's one-on-one university of the real world had all, like their instructor, dropped out of school. Most had lost interest in education years before. 

Nick's job was to get them a job. But he recognized that before he could tackle the issue of employment, he would have to overcome considerable wariness forged over years of stormy relationships with parents, teachers, police, probation officers, and other authority figures. 

"The first thing I tell them," Nick continued, is "I'm not a government agent. I'm here for you. Only you. I'm here because I want to do this."

It was told to me years later that Nick "was the one white guy who could talk to black kids and convince them that America is a land of opportunity." It wasn't a ploy. Nick believed there was hope, and the young people believed Nick, in part, because his own story was so powerful. Orphaned in Greece during World War II, his entire family of twenty-four was slaughtered. He watched his mother and sister die within two weeks. ("I was never a little boy," he recalls, "I was a man when I was seven years old.") Lucky and resilient, he survived, emigrating to the U.S. where he started out working in a leather factory. Later he was a barber, then a bus driver. For over a quarter century, he played the bouzouki in a Greek band. But there were hardships as well, the most painful setback a divorce that left him cut off from his only child, a daughter.

But Nick and the other retirees did more than focus on connecting with the young people. They displayed a radar-like appreciation of how these kids were going to get derailed. They knew, for example, that the young men would oversleep their first weeks of work. So they turned themselves into human alarm clocks. 

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