Music store co-founder dies

Hours after longtime Las Vegas businesswoman Nikki Vesely died Tuesday, her son, Jerry, was sorting through her personal items.

A bittersweet smile crossed his face when, in her address book under his name, he found a photo of his daughter, Cody Vesely, who was killed Feb. 8, 1997, in Las Vegas by a drunken driver.

"She was her only grandchild of her only son and when Cody was killed the whole order of Mom's universe flipped," said Jerry Vesely, owner of Vesely Music Company, the business his mother co-founded 36 years ago.

"They had watched TV and played games together. Mom just seemed to give up and started to go downhill after Cody's death."

Nadine Norma "Nikki" Vesely, the widow of Big Band trombonist Ted Vesely, who taught hundreds of local children how to play instruments at area schools and at the couple's downtown music shop, officially died of respiratory failure at Horizon Specialty Hospital. The true cause probably was a broken heart. She was 85.

A memorial service for the Las Vegas resident of 44 years will be at 1 p.m. July 11 at Christ Church Episcopal, 2000 S. Maryland Parkway. Interment will be in a mausoleum crypt beside Ted Vesely at Palm Mortuary Cemetery, 1325 N. Main St.

The store she and Ted founded at 1729 E. Charleston Blvd. has grown to five times its original size. It was one of the first music shops in Las Vegas and has since become the longest surviving local business of its type.

Nikki Vesely underwent hip replacement surgery on May 17, four days before Cheryl Reilly was sentenced to four-to-10 years in prison for killing Cody and injuring three others in an accident at Russell Road and Lamb Boulevard.

As she recovered from her operation, Vesely, a longtime local horsewoman, spent her days looking forward to her son's visits and admiring the framed photo which she kept on the table beside her bed of her beloved late Tennessee Walking Horse, Bald Boy.

"She would see me in the flesh every day so she didn't need a picture of me, but she grieved for that horse until the day she died," Jerry said.

Nikki first saw the 17 1/2-hand strawberry roan gelding at Edna Gray's Riding Academy in 1960. Workers there told Nikki, who stood a mere 5 feet 2 inches tall, that the big horse was a dangerous renegade and they begged her not to buy him.

Although Bald Boy bucked nearly every man who tried to ride him, he was ever so gentle with Nikki, who bought him for $1,500 and, as a member of the Nevada Lariettes, proudly rode him in Helldorado Days parades.

"She fell in love with Bald Boy's blue eyes and they just bonded," Jerry said, noting that the horse was put out to pasture in the early 1970s and died at age 23.

About that time, on Aug. 20, 1973, Ted Vesely, who had backed up Frank Sinatra and Danny Thomas and had played with the Fred Waring, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw orchestras, suffered a heart attack in the store and died in front of his stepson.

Jerry, who was set to return for his senior year at UNLV where he was majoring in business management, was forced to take over running the shop much earlier than he had expected. Twelve credits shy of graduating, he has never returned to college.

Jerry, like his stepdad, ran the music end of the business while Nikki was the secretary and bookkeeper. She retired in 1982.

Born Nadine Hula on April 9, 1913, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she was the last survivor of four children of Jerome and Mae Hula, who were property managers.

She went to elementary school with Ted Vesely, but moved with her family to West Virginia, where she graduated from high school and later attended business college.

A beauty queen who competed in the West Virginia qualifying event for the Miss America pageant, Nikki married mechanical engineer William Henry Skewis, Jerry's father, and moved with him to California. There the couple divorced in 1953.

Later that year, at the Tom Tom Club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., Nikki was reunited with Ted, who was performing there as leader of Ted Vesely's Jazz Band. A romance sparked and she followed him to Las Vegas in 1954 when he got a job as a Strip musician. They married in 1955.

Ted gave up the nightclub life to become a music teacher at Sunrise Acres Elementary and Madison Elementary (now Madison Sixth Grade Center). She became a secretary at the Sands hotel-casino and later a bookkeeper at Ben Stack Jewelers.

In 1962, local real estate agent and former musician Hank Shank loaned the Veselys $1,000 so they could lease the property and stock their new music store, which long served as his teaching studio.

"The store was a dream come true for Ted," Nikki told the Sun for a story published in the Jan. 9, 1983, editions of the old SUNday magazine supplement. "When he no longer taught school, he wanted to continue to teach music to the kids."

Jerry said that while his stepdad knew the fundamentals of music, "he was no businessman. No question the shop would not have been the success it became without mom's good business sense and wisdom, which usually won out."

Away from the business, Nikki rode horses at her Lazy T-Bone Ranch off Vesely Way in Paradise Valley, where she also raised peacocks, geese, rabbits, pigs and chickens. The home was sold a few years ago to the county for the McCarran International Airport expansion project.

She also co-founded the now-defunct Las Montadas Horse Club.

In addition to her son, Vesely is survived by Jerry's wife, Patricia Vesely.

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