I feel like Band of Brothers fans don’t talk enough about the fact that Grace Nixon was like the coolest lady of all time? She played both piano and cello as a music major at San Diego State University, where she was a member of the Nu Alpha Chi Society for Japanese American students (I did some digging to find this page from her 1942 college yearbook, and you can see her front and center in this photo! She would’ve been around 21 here.)
Her college years were interrupted by Executive Order 9066, which allowed the US government to forcibly remove Japanese American citizens and relocate them to incarceration camps all over the western half of the country. Grace’s family was temporarily relocated to Santa Anita Racetrack, where she managed to retain her optimistic personality–she recalls “dancing the jitterbug at Santa Anita with [her sister] Dorothy and some ‘cute boys from Pasadena’” (quoted in her obituary). She and her family were then relocated to Colorado River Relocation Center in Arizona.
Grace was allowed to leave camp behind when she was accepted into nursing school at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where she received her degree at the age of 24. She moved to New York and worked as both a nurse and a flight attendant, proving herself to be literally the coolest lady ever!!
[The Pacific Citizen, August 7, 1948, page 3]
[could not find the original source for this article]
Grace married Lewis Nixon in 1956. They never had children, but they “often spent time with their [fourteen] nieces and nephews, teaching them cards and backgammon and playing for keeps over the children’s allowance money. Grace and Lewis traveled the world together, raised a menagerie of pets, and remained happily married for 39 years before Lewis’ death in 1995.
Grace is featured in Ron Livingston’s Band of Brothers video diary. He describes her as an “amazing woman… smart, vibrant, has an amazing story of her own, and she helped me a lot as far as just explaining kind of what the guy [Nixon] was about.” They are pictured together below.
Grace died in 2016 at the age of 94 and cemented herself in my estimation as the coolest person of all time!! She is only mentioned once in Band of Brothers, but I want everyone to read this and realize how fucking fantastic she was! Genuinely such a role model for me!
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