He grew up with his older sister, Roma, and attended the local public elementary schools. Because Nick suffered from asthma, his parents sent him to boarding schools in the mountains in his teenage years. For one year, he had the unusual experience of going to a boys’ school at Mohonk Mountain House, a grand hotel on a mountain lake in New Paltz, New York. The owners, the Smiley family, taught classes and housed the boys in the hotel rooms. In the afternoons, the boys would swim, hike, ski, skate, or work around the property. He loved the school and talked about it for the rest of his life.
Nick went on to graduate from Northwood School in Lake Placid, New York, near the site of the 1932 Winter Olympics. He was on the ski team and ski jumped (the latter of which left him with nightmares!).
In 1943, Nick joined the 10th Mountain Division—the first American ski troops—and fought in the Apennine Mountains of Italy in 1945. He was awarded the Silver Star for, in the words of the Army, “gallant conduct under fire” and “disregard for his own safety to save the lives of his comrades.”
After the war, he attended Dartmouth College, where he wrote for the student paper, helped edit the literary magazine, and graduated with an English degree in 1949. He landed a job as a reporter for the Rutland Daily Herald in Vermont, then was hired by the Associated Press wire service. While assigned to the AP’s Baltimore bureau, he met Liselotte “Bee” Davis, a college student and native of Baltimore. After her graduation, they married on Sept. 16, 1955, and moved to New York City when he was transferred to AP’s headquarters there.
After spending the 1950s in journalism, he switched to teaching. He said that the first time he set foot in a classroom, he knew he was in the right place. In the 1960s, he taught English at three boarding schools. He became chair of the English department at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, a girls’ school that his mother and many other family members attended.
In the mid-1960s, Nick became interested in teaching at the university level and earned a Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York in Albany. He combined his English teaching and newspaper reporting to become the first director of the University of Delaware’s journalism program, which was part of the English department. He led the journalism program for 21 years, teaching everything from basic reporting to radio writing. He also taught English and American literature classes, including a popular detective fiction class.
He retired as a university professor in 1991. He and Bee moved to Lakeville in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut. He taught extension classes on literature through the Taconic Learning Center, joined book clubs, sang with the HousaTonics men’s barbershop group, swam (including across Lake Wononscopomuc), and cross-country skied for years. He endowed a lecture fund at the University of Delaware to bring reporters to speak on campus.
He and Bee lived on Belgo Road in Lakeville. After nearly 52 years of marriage, she died of cancer in 2007. He moved to the Noble Horizons retirement community, where he was a friendly fixture for years.
He celebrated Christmas with his family in 2025 then, days later, entered Sharon Hospital with pneumonia that led to a heart attack and congestive heart failure. On New Year’s Day 2026, at age 100 years, six months, he died as his daughter read him a poem by John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
Nick loved chatting up strangers, savoring a good meal with wine, reading, playing chess, learning new things, skiing, traveling, concertgoing, wordplay, spending time with friends and family, and almost anything Italian. Days before his death, he asked his son to take him out to his favorite restaurant—the Woodland in Lakeville—for dinner.
Survivors include his daughter, Louisa, of Bethesda, Maryland, and her partner, David Shelton; his son, Matthew, daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, and grandchildren, John and Julia, all of Chicago; a niece, Anne Hockmeyer Brown; a nephew, Brian Hockmeyer, and Brian’s wife, Ann. Nick’s sister, Roma Nickerson Hockmeyer, died in 1981.
A memorial service will be held at the Congregational Church of Salisbury, Connecticut, on Saturday, Feb. 14, at noon. A reception will follow.
