Margaret Louise "Peg" Nichols, KD0VQO, passed away April 20, 2026, at the University of Kansas Health System Olathe Hospital following a short illness. She was 98.
Peg was born in Palmyra, Missouri on November 28, 1927, the daughter of William Denver Yancey and Margaret Henrietta (Dickson) Yancey. With the exception of three years when the family lived in either Arkansas where her father came from or Missouri where her mother was raised, she spent her childhood in rural southern California and it was there that she was first introduced to the world of amateur radio.
Peg recalled at one time that when she was growing up in California, her father signed up to receive lessons in amateur radio - there was an expense involved, she said - but he struggled with the Morse code requirement tied to an operator's license and eventually set the lessons aside.
Money being tight in those days, and not wanting the investment in amateur radio lessons to go to waste, Peg's mother decided to delve into the lessons that had given her husband trouble and ultimately obtained a license herself. The suffix of her call sign was VQO.
Peg's mother apparently heard Marshall Ensor, Loretta Ensor, or both, over the air sometime in the 1930s because after she and her husband moved to Grandview, Missouri from northern Arkansas in the early 1960s, she was pleased to be able to join a weekly net for women that was run by Loretta from the Ensor home south of Olathe.
Peg would recall this connection whenever she told fellow hams and others about the time she drove her mother out to the Ensor farm one summer day so that she could meet Loretta. She said Loretta gave them a personal tour of the farmhouse and that when they at last reached the Radio Room, her mother was virtually spellbound at the sight of it, this being the very place Marshall and Loretta had been talking to her from decades earlier.
Peg remembered seeing Marshall during that visit to the farm - he occupied the driver's seat of a piece of farm machinery that was nearby - and she knew his wife, Ina, a former schoolteacher, who by then was working at the Olathe library.
A Spanish teacher in Olathe and later a newspaper publisher in southwest Missouri, Peg earned a technician license well into her retirement years and always considered herself "a gray-haired rookie," to borrow her words. That said, she made a real effort to keep track of any and all legislation that threatened the interests of amateur radio operators in America and enjoyed sharing this information with her fellow members of the Santa Fe Trail Amateur Radio Club.
Ensorfest 2023 - Rick, Marty and Peg
Peg was a generous supporter of the club and its various activities and projects, and for a few years she even helped out with the tours at Ensor Park and Museum. She regularly invited elected officials and candidates for public office to drop by Ensor Park and Museum during Field Day in order to connect them to the amateur radio community, and she faithfully kept a stash of Ensor brochures in her purse for distribution here, there and yonder in her adopted role as an ambassador for the operation.
Preceded in death by her husband, Richard Garland "Dick" Nichols, and a nephew, Peg is survived by three children, Richard William "Rick", Thomas Britt (Teresa Riffel) and Dr. Margaret Ellen (Bill White), a sister, six grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and 10 nephews and nieces.
