His goal is to help kids be winners in life

Donald Hicks has a straight back, nice shoes and clean fingernails as he stands up, whistle in mouth, and calls for the kids at his basketball camp to settle down.

But it wasn’t always that way. Growing up in Swiftwater, Miss., it seemed he always had dirt under his fingernails.

No matter how hard he scrubbed — sometimes until they bled — he couldn’t get his fingernails clean.

Hicks learned to work from an early age, chopping and picking cotton, feeding pigs and chickens and working in vegetable gardens. He sold some of the vegetables in town, and he sold the pecans and muscadines he gathered to classmates. He also cut grass to make money.

“At 6 years of age, I was chopping cotton for somebody else,” Hicks said. He was training in his family’s fields to chop cotton by the age of 5.

“I was being trained to work for a living,” Hicks said.

It was just a way of life for a boy with 15 siblings growing up in the small Mississippi town. But it wasn’t an easy life.

Everyone worked to contribute to the family income so the bills would be paid and they would have the necessities of life. And his parents made sure their children went to church and were active in the church.

Even though he worked, many days he didn’t have money for a cold lunch — a pint of milk and a square of cornbread — at school, much less a hot lunch like the affluent kids got.

Working in the fields meant he didn’t always get to school. He wasn’t one of the students with perfect attendance.

“But I remember being warm, fed and loved by my parents,” Hicks said.

He also remembers from an early age studying the people in town who didn’t have dirt under their fingernails. Hicks said he realized that the people who could connect a subject and verb together — talk “proper” — had nice clothes and clean shoes and their backs were straight.

He paid attention to the kind of work those people did because they obviously weren’t sweating all day like he was. The people he took note of were an architect, a teacher, a doctor and a lawyer.

The list also included a carpenter. Hicks said a carpenter wanted him to apprentice with him and even asked his father if he could. But his father said no. At the time, Hicks said, he thought his father was being mean, but he now realizes his father was protecting him. A carpenter’s life in the area wasn’t easy. His father knew that, Hicks said, and likely saw his son’s potential. Hicks said the other thing his father wouldn’t let him do was work at the same plant he did or learn to drive a tractor. He said his father probably knew he would get used to the money and settle in.

And the young man’s goal was to get out of Swiftwater, Miss.

Hicks saw his chance when he was 16 years old and got the opportunity to go to the University of Wisconsin for a summer program that attempted to recruit minority students into the engineering and science fields. He learned chemistry, trigonometry, geometry and physics on a college level. Back home, he was in the top 10 percent of his school.

Once he got a taste of life beyond his hometown, it was one he knew he had to pursue.

“I figured out, ‘Buddy, you’d better jump up on this wagon,’” Hicks said.

During the summer session, Hicks decided to buckle down — he didn’t have all the distractions of home — and ended up receiving a trophy for the most improved student.

When he graduated from high school, the University of Wisconsin at Madison offered him an academic scholarship. Even though he didn’t really know what an engineer was, he decided to major in chemical engineering so he could parlay that into a medical degree. But organic chemistry stumped him so he changed his major to industrial engineering and graduated in 1981.

Hicks ended up in Catawba County when Gulf States Paper Corp. offered him a job. After four years, the company wanted him to move to Texas but Hicks decided he liked Catawba County and this was where he was staying. He left the company and did carpentry and rock masonry, which is something he said he never wanted to do. He later went to work for a medical device company but lost his job after nine years due to downsizing.

Hicks just ended a three-year stint with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system and is on the hunt for another job.

The importance of an education, a strong work ethic and good character is something Hicks is trying to instill in the kids who attend the Donald Hicks Basketball Day Camp. It’s a camp that Hicks and his family and a host of volunteers conduct for a week every summer for the last 10 years. He gives his wife, Dana, and children all the credit for keeping the camp going.

It’s what education did for him and the strong early influence of his parents that he wants to pass on to the kids who attend his basketball camp. Kids who are successful, Hicks believes, have parents (or adults) advocating for them.

The basketball camp not only teaches the game but it incorporates math and reading, as well as character building.

“I want to invest in their life to get a conscious because when I get to be an old man I want to be able to walk down an alley and feel safe,” Hicks said.

His long-term vision is to connect senior citizens with children because kids need someone to take an interest in them and older folks need to feel needed and impart some of their wisdom, Hicks believes. He envisions a place where seniors tutor and mentor kids after school.

“There’s a need on both ends,” Hicks said.