TEXAS

Let us begin, at the beginning. Chester William Nimitz was born February 24, 1885, in the German-American settlement of Fredericksburg, Texas. He could claim a maritime heritage of sorts—both his grandfather and greatgrandfather had gone to sea. For his great-grandfather, it was a full-time job; his grandfather Charles Henry Nimitz's sea time was limited to perhaps one cruise as a teenager, yet for most of his adult life he was known as Captain Nimitz. This was a military not maritime rank that came from his role as organizer of a Civil War–era volunteer militia in Texas.

Charles Henry was the most influential person in young Chester's life. One of the founders of Fredericksburg, which he and a small group of settlers built from scratch in 1846, Charles Henry was a classic entrepreneur. He set up a hotel in an eight-room sun-dried-brick building, which over time grew to offer forty-five guest rooms, a dining hall, casino, bar, brewery, bathhouse, and a combination ballroom and theatre. And, over time, the ever-expanding building came to resemble a beached steamship—complete with a mast for the flag and a crow's nest for looking out over the hills. With a bit of enlightened marketing, it became known as Captain Nimitz' Steamboat Hotel. In its heyday, the Nimitz was the last commercial hotel between the Gulf Coast and San Diego and played host to such guests as Colonel Robert E. Lee, General Philip Sheridan, and the author O. Henry, who used the hotel as the backdrop for a short story.

Charles Henry had twelve children; one son, Chester Bernard, was never really well, perhaps a combination of rheumatic fever and a congenital weakness of the lungs. Chester Bernard thought that working in the great outdoors as a cowboy, moving large herds of cows from Texas to Nebraska, would be curative. It was not, and five months after he married Anna Henke, the daughter of a cattle rancher, Chester Bernard died. Anna was pregnant with their son. She named him after his father.

Anna and baby Chester moved into her father-in-law's hotel where she worked in the kitchen. Chester grew up as a scrappy kid. His friends all had fathers, he did not. His friends enjoyed a lot of playtime, he was often stuck helping his mother in the kitchen. His light-blond hair triggered the nickname "Cottontop," which he hated so much so early in life that he once dumped a pot of green paint on his head in a that-will-show-'em! sort of move. His mother had to shave his head. Quick to anger, he got into fights with kids at school who teased or bullied him. He seems to have been pretty good at it, at least, according to relatives telling tales some seventy years after the fact, who credited him with taking on and defeating two at a time. Somewhere along the way he decided that fighting was not the best way to solve problems and learned to control his temper. Most of the time.

When Chester was not quite six, Anna married her husband's brother, Willie, and the family moved some twenty-four miles away to Kerrville, to live in and manage another hotel, owned by Chester's aunt, a widow. The St. Charles was an overgrown boarding house, with only half the guest rooms and none of the charm of the Steamboat Hotel, but it offered a place to live and work. Willie and Anna had two children, Dora and Otto. Charles Henry turned day-to-day operation of his hotel over to his son Charles Henry Jr., drifted into politics, and was elected to the Texas State Legislature.

Willie was an engineer by education, a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but once back in Texas, he became a professional overseer: an expert at watching other people work. He was amiable, played hotel host at times, but much to the disgust of his father, who had paid for his expensive education, Willie was never gainfully employed as an engineer. The only actual job anyone remembers him having was as a timekeeper, late in life. But Willie, to his credit, had no delusions. In an honest bit of regret, he once told his daughter, "You know, I couldn't sell gold dollars for fifty cents apiece."

Chester had his first paying job, a dollar a week, at the age of eight, as a delivery boy for a local meat market owned by his mother's family. As he got older, he waited tables in the hotel dining room, did yard work, chopped wood and carried it around to the dozen or so stoves and fireplaces in the hotel. When he was fifteen, his aunt started paying him fifteen dollars a month. In addition to the regular chores, he became the evening desk clerk, on duty until 10 P.M.

Perhaps influenced by knowledge of his father's systemic poor health and nudged by his mother, Chester became an exercise fanatic. He swam, ran, and walked—sometimes, as much as a fourteen-mile hike to an uncle's farm. Many years later a cousin recalled, "Nothing stands out more than his utter determination to remain physically fit." The cousin added that when Chester came home for a visit some years later, "He carried a clock on his leg and he got in a certain mileage every day."

His recreation was typical of boys in rural Texas: pitching horseshoes, fishing, hunting for rabbits and doves, catching rattlesnakes to harvest their rattles, going on week-long camping trips with grandfather Nimitz, or pretending to be a cowboy on the ranch where his maternal grandfather Henry Henke raised his cattle. Grandmother Henke did not speak English, so Chester became pretty fluent in German. He was also mischievous: "borrowing" a neighbor's boat for a row on the river (well, borrowed more than once, to the frustration of the neighbor who sometimes wanted to use the boat himself), and tying tin cans to a dog's tail. Fortunately, his solid Germanic middle-class background provided a few socially acceptable distractions, such as a love of classical music and skill at playing card games—notably cribbage, poker, and bridge—which would prove useful later in life.

Education? He was a quick study. The principal of Tivy High School said they "couldn't keep him busy, he was that fast." Whatever they gave him to do was quickly done, "and he was looking around for something to do ... some trouble to get into."

Confidence? A fishing party hired the cook at the hotel to go along on their river expedition and he was a no-show. Chester, barely in his teens, said, "I'll go and cook for you." The fishermen said, "What can you cook?," and Chester said, "I can cook all the fish you can get." And he did.

What of the future? Horizons were limited. Young Chester was not interested in either of the family businesses, but local opportunities...