From his downtown Jacksonville,
Texas, office, Robert Nichols ’68
can keep tabs on the traffic on
Commerce Street. This is smalltown
Texas, but with a twist.
Jacksonville, on U.S. 69 between Rusk
and Tyler, stands out as a mecca for middleand
high-tech businesses, the result of
purposeful planning and diligent effort.
“We’ve been working at it since the 1950s,”
Nichols said of the town’s diversification. He
can take pride in the accomplishment, not
only as a purveyor of the plan but as founder
of four of Jacksonville’s anchor companies.
He is well known in the town where
his heart is – and not just for his business
prowess. Nichols has served on countless
boards of business and charitable
organizations, as supporter of the town’s
junior college and hospital, on city council
and two terms as mayor.
Today, Nichols shows this same passion
in his second term on the Texas
Transportation Commission after Gov. Rick
Perry reappointed him in June 2003.
Nichols has brought to the position a
noted industriousness, a discipline sparked
early, fostered at Lamar and honed through decades of
successful product development and manufacturing.
Honored by the nomination and genuinely surprised
at his selection as commissioner by then-Gov. George W.
Bush in 1997, Nichols took to the task in the only way
he knew how – “get out there and get educated.” He
embarked on a 120-day tour of all 25 district offices,
spending two or three days at each, then visited most
county area and maintenance offices in Texas, listening to
the concerns and learning the projects, priorities and
problems in all areas of the state.
“I went to every work station trying to meet everyone,”
Nichols said of the leadership style he carried forward
from his company days.
He also met with local elected
officials in each community to
learn first hand their needs and
to see how well the department’s
stated priorities matched
up. “By and large, I found that
we were doing a good job of
listening and planning the right
projects,” Nichols said.
What he also found, however,
was an organization that
had grown too process oriented
and too little project focused.
Together, the commissioners set
about to help create a change in
the department’s culture.
Within three years, without raising transportation
taxes or fees, TxDOT increased “output to the road”
about 75 percent and since that time has almost tripled it
with the same number of employees, Nichols said. Fiscal
year 2005 purchase orders for highway construction are
expected to be around $4.5 billion, up from around $1.7
billion in 1995-96.
“TxDOT has worked together to break the logjams,
and as output increased, enthusiasm has grown, and local
and legislative support has increased,” Nichols said.
Another challenge Nichols found in 1997 were rules
and statutes that lingered from outmoded thinking. He
set to work to find support to get those laws changed.
One statute forbade TxDOT from spending state funds
on construction of user-funded projects such as toll roads.
Now, TxDOT is spending about 20 percent state funds
on the $2.9-billion Austin State Highway 130 project, a
50-plus-mile tolled freeway system. User fees will fund
the balance, Nichols said, but the project to relieve
Interstate 35 congestion could not move forward without
direct state investment.
Safety is always a top priority, Nichols said, followed
by the incredibly complex challenge of relieving urban
highway congestion. The costs can be eye-watering.
Acquisition of right-of-way exceeded $300 million for the
Interstate 10 Katy Freeway lane expansion underway in
West Houston. The cost of the Dallas Central
Expressway U.S. 75 and Interstate 635 interchange project
will near $500 million. Yet the cost of addressing the
problem pales compared to the cost of doing nothing,
Nichols said.
Traffic already snarls every Texas city, as the number
of vehicles on Texas highways continues to grow. In the
next 20 years, state demographers
expect 9 million people to
call Texas home, and 90 percent
of those people will live in the
state’s urban areas. TxDOT
knows that for every 1 percent
growth in population, vehicle
miles traveled increase by 2 to 3
percent.
“There is more highway
construction underway in Texas
than there has been in several
decades,” Nichols said of the
full-throttle effort to address the
growing challenge of getting
around the state.
In Nichols’ Commerce Street office, three silver
revolvers are proudly displayed in a glass case at the end
of the hall. More than toys, these cap guns pay homage
to the genesis of Nichols’ passion for manufacturing.
The creation of Nichols’ father, Talley, the six-shooters are
die-cast zinc with white plastic grips, reminiscent of the
arms that tamed the Wild West and flourished in the
imaginations of America’s youth in a day when the cowboy
genre dominated Saturday afternoon matinees and
became the staple of daytime television. Young Nichols
grew up wandering around his father’s tool and die shop,
visiting the factory floor with a growing fascination for
making things. By the time he graduated Jacksonville
High School in 1963, he was determined to do just that.
After contacting a number of Texas colleges that had
recognized engineering schools, Nichols found Lamar’s
industrial engineering program the strongest in the state.
“Lamar taught me how to prioritize business decisions
and to figure the cost so I could analyze the whole
factory. So, later, it was just a matter of figuring out
what I wanted to make,” Nichols said.
“Having saved up my
money to go to college, I
was looking for the best
value,” Nichols said. That
meant buying used books
over new, opting for a dorm
room without air conditioning
– saving $20 a month –
and finding part-time jobs.
On his first day at
Lamar, Nichols met David
Gates, a professor of industrial
engineering and later
chairman of the department.
After working hard
several semesters to make ends meet –
including ironing shirts for other students –
Nichols discovered the college’s co-op
program and landed a job at Union Carbide
in Texas City.
As a sophomore, Nichols opened a
fireworks stand with a $250 investment.
With the proceeds, he built a larger stand
and improved the first. By his senior year,
he had 10 large fireworks stands open in
Houston, Texas City, Galveston,
Beaumont, Orange and Port Arthur, all
staffed by fellow engineering students who
kept 10 percent of the take. In his last 10
days of operation, Nichols cleared $30,000
– in a time when a brand-new Pontiac
GTO sold for $3,500 and graduating engineers
were averaging annual salaries of less
than $10,000. “Still, I didn’t feel like my
future was in firecrackers,” Nichols said of
his decision to sell the business.
In the late 1960s, plastics was one
of the fastest-growing industry groups.
Nichols’ Union Carbide co-op had introduced
him to a variety of plastics, and he
was soon recruited by Phillips Petroleum
as one of a dozen people to be trained by
the company “in every means of plastics
processing known to man.”
“It was like getting a Ph.D. in plastics
processing,” Nichols said of the time in the
company’s Bartlesville, Okla., laboratory. “I
met with the researchers in the morning and
worked with advanced machinery in the
afternoons making practical things.” After
completing training, he moved to the
Phillips products division to pursue his interest
in injection molding processes.
While he intended to go into business
for himself, a call from his father changed his
direction. Now semi-retired but still owner
of the tool and die shop, his father had purchased
several plastics-molding machines and
opened TallyHo Plastics. Within a year or
two, the company was losing money, and his
father’s retirement was in jeopardy.
“I really didn’t want to go into the family
business, but, in the end, it turned out to
be the best thing that could have happened
to me,” Nichols said. For the next few years,
he studied the company from top to bottom,
applying the business training he had learned
at Lamar. “We took the business from gross
sales of $500,000 and a $50,000 annual loss,
to $5 million in sales and about 14 percent
profit,” Nichols said. He also diversified the
business by creating products and parts for
the aviation, construction, electronics, military
and air conditioning industries.
With his background, training and
experience, Nichols grew increasingly adept
at assessing customer needs, often evaluating
and redesigning products to make them
better and more cheaply than before, and
he could present the customer with a cost
estimate very quickly. Supporting several
industries also allowed him to bring unique
approaches from one discipline to another,
often helping meet customer needs in
unforeseen ways.
Nichols sought to break into the medical
industry as well, “but I never could make
inroads.” Rebuffed because he had no medical
product experience, he sought people
with ideas – doctors and nurses – who wanted
to develop medical products. “Many of
those ideas were never successful,” Nichols
said. But some were. One plastic medical
pan made a lot of money for the investors,
and the family sold to Kendall L.P. Nichols
also began working for
three Dallas-area investors
with an idea for an intravenous
device. “We
worked nights and weekends
on the design and
production problems,” he
said. The product proved
successful, the company
grew, became a division of
Travenal and was bought
by Baxter. “I found myself
making millions of parts
for Kendall, Travenal and
then Baxter – three big
names in the medical products field,”
Nichols said.
Sometimes he would visit hospitals to
see how his products were being used. One
visit to an operating room led to a very successful
product when he spotted a two-gallon
glass pickle jar used to collect a patient’s
fluids while in surgery. “The nurse hated it,”
Nichols said. “It got slippery and if you
dropped it you’d have glass splinters and
blood everywhere. It had to be dumped,
rinsed and sterilized, repackaged. And then
you could look forward to using it again.
“I told her I could make one of those
out of plastic, and it would be cheaper and it
wouldn’t break,” he said. That idea became
a new business. With a $1,000 investment
and $10,000 from the bank, Nichols worked
on the design on nights and weekends.
Nichols had earlier worked with one of
Dr. Michael DeBakey’s nurses on a project,
so he had opportunity to visit with the
famous heart specialist one Saturday morning.
DeBakey liked the product so much he
wanted all of his operating rooms converted
for Monday morning surgery.
“We scrambled that weekend, but from
then on when anyone asked me who used
the product I’d say ‘It’s the only one Dr.
DeBakey will even consider using.’ That
opened all kind of doors,” Nichols said. As
sales picked up, he founded Medi-Vac in
Jacksonville, began to hire and quickly grew
the company to about 650 employees.
“Dr. Gates would have loved the factory
layout and automation,” Nichols said of his
Lamar professor. Silos of plastic pellets
stood at one end of the building and the
loading dock at the other. Between them
stretched automation and assembly, including
numerous robotic operations that ran 24-7,
averaging production of two units per second
and allowing Medi-Vac to supply hospitals
throughout the U.S. “We converted the
entire U.S. suction collection device market
to plastic,” Nichols said. At 39, he sold
Medi-Vac to Baxter, then sold TallyHo
Plastics to investors and retired.
With royalties from his 12 U.S. patents,
Nichols could have settled into a life of ease
“but like a race horse, I couldn’t be still,”
he said.
He knew that the nation’s large chemical
companies developed plastic lines that
covered the vast majority of the market, but
that niche markets were unmet. “No one in
a five-state area was creating custom-made
plastics,” Nichols said. He bought industrial
property north of Jacksonville to create a
“plastics campus,” including a research and
development laboratory, and a pilot manufacturing
facility. He then hired “a bunch of
smart people” and founded Progressive
Polymers.
“I knew many manufacturers were buying
more expensive plastics than they really
needed for the products they were making,”
Nichols said. He set out to create more
cost-effective plastic compounds. Soon, a
major portion of his business became custom-
tailored plastics for the major chemical
companies and private-labeled products.
Within a year, he began to produce a
plastic container to sterilize and store surgical
equipment. This box, manufactured from a
strong thermally conductive plastic the
research lab developed, replaced an antiquated
process in which instruments were
wrapped in cloth or disposable paper, steamsterilized
and stored. Every 30 days, instruments
would have to be sterilized again.
Nichols’ founded Monarch Products to manufacture
the box in which instruments could
be stored in a sterilized environment indefinitely.
He began converting the industry
from the old method to the box system,
which featured a disposable filter cartridge.
Within a few years, 750 hospitals had moved
to the Monarch product, and the company
took the system international to Canada,
France, Italy, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia,
Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and
Singapore. It was nearing a deal with India
when a distribution agreement with Johnson
& Johnson blossomed and later turned into
an offer to buy the company outright in
1992. One of his partners in the venture,
Bill Patterson, was also a Lamar engineering
graduate.
Four years later, Nichols sold the
compounding facility to investors and retired
again, now with 32 U.S. patents and 165
foreign patents to his credit. “I still had a lot
of ideas for products, but had to re-evaluate
my personal life to decide do I want to
keep building factories or do I want to do
something else?” Nichols said.
For the people of Texas, that “something
else” came in the form of a call from
the governor’s office.
Aside from his considerable duties as a
TxDOT commissioner, Nichols leaves time
for family – he and his wife, Donna, live in
Jacksonville and have three children, Brittney,
Joshua and Collynn – flying as a private
pilot, raising registered Longhorn cattle, as
well as world travels in pursuit of exotic
game, many displayed in his home and his
Jacksonville office. Nichols’ “retirement” is a
busy one.
