In this day and age, most people change jobs an average of seven times in their lifetimes. Betty Nix defied the odds, working for AQHA for 40 years.
Nix and her husband, Ted, moved to Amarillo because he was serving in the Air Force. An employment agency put Betty in contact with AQHA and Raymond Hollingsworth, the Executive Secretary of the Association. At that time, there were only 10 employees recording and registering American Quarter Horses.
Her first task was to tackle a room stacked with boxes of back-logged mail, stemming from the close of the 1950 deadline for applications of horses with one Quarter Horse parent or known Quarter Horse blood.
Nix’s usefulness to AQHA did not end with that assignment. Out of necessity, she cross-trained and became proficient at the jobs of other employees so she could pick up the slack when someone was absent. In this manner, she was beginning to lay the groundwork for the important role she would play in the Association’s future. Her willingness to handle any job would eventually make her an ideal person to supervise other employees.
Before long, Nix had worked her way up to secretary to AQHA Executive Secretary Howard Linger, and not long after, she became an Administrative Assistant and cultivated a reputation as a trouble-shooter for problem files.
By the time Nix retired, AQHA had just completed the installation of a new AS/400 computer system, which modernized records to the extent that almost any bit of information about a horse or owner could be called up within a matter of seconds.
Nix was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 1993.
Biography updated as of March 1993.