Donald Lee Nickles is an American politician who was a Republican United States Senator from Oklahoma from 1981 until 2005. He was a fiscal and social conservative. Don Nickles was born and raised in Ponca City, Oklahoma, where he attended the public schools. To help pay for their education at Oklahoma State, he and his wife operated a janitorial service in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He was a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Oklahoma State University, and earned a BA in business administration in 1971 After college, he went to work for Nickles Machine Corporation in Ponca City, a business... started in 1918 by his grandfather, Clair Nickles. He rose to be the company's vice president and general manager. He also served in the United States National Guard from 1970 until 1976. A formative experience was the distress his family suffered following his father's death in 1961, when Nickles was thirteen. They had to sell off part of the family business to raise cash to pay the estate tax that was due. Encouraged by then-Senator Dewey F. Bartlett, Nickles ran for the Oklahoma State Senate in 1978 and won.
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