In 1982 when Nancy Kixmiller interviewed for her second teaching job, the principal asked what her former boss would say if they called and asked about her. Kixmiller quickly replied. “She’s a little squirrely but she’s okay!” The principal broke out laughing. Because that’s exactly what her former boss told him. Kixmiller got the job and stayed for 24 years, teaching instrumental and vocal music to middle schoolers. (5th-8th)
Kixmiller was clearly the kind of teacher that kids wanted to be around. They would hang out in her classroom before school started so she learned about their lives, including some things she probably didn’t want to know as well. “I had everybody from kids playing with Barbies to guys being arrested and girls I was afraid were going to get pregnant. It was the whole gamut.”
Kixmiller was born and raised in the tiny town of Prairie Home, Missouri, about 30 miles from Columbia. Her senior class numbered 11. “Everybody does everything in a town that size,” she says. “Everybody is in band. Everybody is in choir. So yeah, I did band and choir both and played clarinet and bass clarinet.”
Education was the family profession, aside from farming. Her mother, aunt and grandparents were all teachers. Her dad’s father was president of the local school board and her mother’s father was the superintendent of schools. Kixmiller thought she wanted to be a forest ranger when she first went to the University of Missouri but quickly realized that wasn’t her calling. She ended up getting a B.S. in education with an emphasis in teaching music. Her first job out of college was in the St. Louis area, teaching K-6 music and beginning band. It didn’t exactly go according to plan.
“It was miserable,” Kixmiller recalls. “I’d go home on the weekends, and I’d just cry driving back home.” She didn’t know anyone in St. Louis, the workload was heavy and the learning curve steep. She felt ill-prepared and wondered if she’d made a mistake. Then she talked to some of her mother’s teacher friends. “They’d say, 'Honey, I cried every night the first year I taught, too,'” Kixmiller recalls. She ended up teaching music for 31 years and finished out her career at the school she had attended as a child, moving back to Prairie Home to be near her aging mother. She taught while also raising her adopted son Ben, now 27 and living in Columbia, Missouri.
Kixmiller says teaching music is satisfying because not all kids excel academically or are athletic. But they could be part of “something really cool” in band. “Band makes them better kids,” she says. It gives them discipline and a chance to perform on stage and get positive feedback, according to Kixmiller. “You’re part of a bigger whole and making music touches the emotions.”
Kixmiller’s connection to Estes Park came at a very early age. She and her family started coming to the YMCA of the Rockies when she was seven. Big family reunions at the Y followed over the years. “Really, I can’t tell you what a big part of my growing up Estes is,” she says with a catch in her throat. She’d always wanted to live in Estes Park and when she and her family sold their farmland in Prairie Home, she knew it was time to live out her dream. She closed on her condo in Estes Park in February of 2022. Her family in Missouri was thrilled, including her former in-laws who helped move her out to Colorado.
Kixmiller is a 5th generation Methodist and has always felt comfortable in the church. (Although her great- grandfather left the Methodist Church in Prairie Home when they got a pipe organ. “Instrument of the devil,” was how he described it) Who knows if her great grandfather would approve, but Kixmiller now directs EPUMC’s choir (accompanied by piano, not organ!) with humor, playfulness and an ability to adapt to constant change. Unlike leading a school band or choir, where attendance is mandatory, she’s had to learn to balance the comings and goings of choir members as they go on vacation, escape to warmer climes in winter, or pursue other passions. At rehearsals “sometimes I’ll have one soprano, one tenor and maybe a bass!” she laughs. “I fret and then I think ‘whoever will be there will be there. I have to take a breath.”
Aside from directing the choir, Kixmiller also performs with the bell choir, serves on the Missions Committee and works nine hours a week in the church office as EPUMC’s administrative assistant. But her real passion, she says, is Crossroads Ministry, where she volunteers weekly. Serving the public has always been a priority in her family, says Kixmiller, and the food pantry that she started at her church in Prairie Home is still going strong.
When Kixmiller isn’t volunteering, working, or hiking, you’ll probably find her following her favorite teams, the Kansas City Chiefs and the University of Missouri Tigers. After all, she played clarinet with Marching Mizzou in college and has attended well over one hundred Mizzou football games. As for her beloved Chiefs, badly defeated at this year’s Super Bowl, Kixmiller’s loyalty remains. “I was a fan for a lot of very bad years.”