By ROD ZOOK
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Longtime Hutchinson resident and leader of First National Bank, Nation Meyer, died last Thursday. He was 98 years old.
Meyer was a part of the Bank for 70 years, starting there when he was 22 and ending up as the Senior Chairman of the Board not that long ago.
His daughter, Laura Meyer-Dick, says the one thing that always amazed her was her father's memory.
“It was unbelievable,” Meyer-Dick said. “He was just telling me about a week ago . . . he was telling the life history of the Morton family that started Morton Salt and also founded Arbor Day. He knew all of the details and all of the generations.”
Meyer was also a driving force in starting many organizations and clubs in the area. Meyer-Dick named off a few of them.
“He founded the Data Center. He was the founding director of Prairie Dunes, founding director of the Reno County Historical Society, founding director of the Delos Smith Center,” Meyer-Dick said.
The Town Club was one of his other loves, according to Meyer-Dick, who talked about her father's efforts to save the club. “He worked hard. He had probably five or six restaurants come in and look at that location,” Meyer-Dick said. “And he had a business model he tried to put together. I think he would have been successful if the Board of the Town Club had not sold the building to the district so quickly.”
Meyer also had a long list of what his daughter called “Nation’s Rules.” She disclosed a few of them.
“The one was, 'there’s no place like home,' and the other one was an Einstein quote, 'The problems of this world cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them,'” she said.
Others included “everything in moderation” and “nothing good ever happens after midnight.”
Meyer-Dick said that her father never stopped working to make the city he loved a better place and was a longtime advocate for the Hutchinson community, especially the downtown area.
He was a 1939 graduate of Hutchinson High School, attended the University of Kansas until late 1942, and was a member of Beta Theta Pi Fraternity. At that time, he joined the United States Navy as a Naval Aviator and served until January 1946, when he returned to Hutchinson.
He served as president of the Hutchinson Chamber of Commerce in 1954. Meyer was also instrumental in the merger of the two local hospitals to form Hutchinson Regional Hospital.