For Nell Yaksh, the phrase “home is where the heart is” was not a cliche. It was reality.
While her husband’s career in the construction industry moved the family across Georgia, Florida and Texas more than a dozen times, and once across the Atlantic Ocean, she always found a way to make a home for the family, no matter their location.
“She and Father were a team,” said her eldest son, Tony “T.L.” Yaksh, who lives in San Diego. “While he went out and worked, she stayed in and made a home for us.”
Yaksh, who smoked when she was younger, suffered from emphysema for years, her sons said. Nell Atkins Yaksh of Buford died Saturday at home in her sleep. She was 90.
A funeral is planned for 11 a.m. Tuesday at A. S. Turner & Sons Funeral Home, which is also in charge of arrangements. Burial at Arlington Memorial Park will follow the service.
Raised on a cattle ranch in Christoval, Texas, the former Nell Atkins was the second of seven children. The level of responsibility she assumed at home as a young woman likely prepared her for the life she led as an adult, her sons said.
“On the ranch you did what needed to be done,” said her youngest son, John Yaksh of Tampa, Fla. “And that’s what she did every time we moved to a new location.”
Yaksh said that when his mother was 15, her mother took her to enroll at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She stayed in college for a time but returned around the time World War II began. She took a job at what is now Mathis Field in San Angelo, Texas, a former Army training airfield, where she met Tony Yaksh. The couple married in January 1943 at the base chapel.
It was after the war when the Yaksh family, which would eventually include three sons, moved from city to city, depending on where Tony Yaksh’s next build was. They initially stayed in rooming houses, but Nell Yaksh didn’t like the idea of her infant son in different surroundings all the time, T.L. Yaksh said. So the couple bought a small trailer that they hitched to their truck, and she made that their home for several years.
Yaksh said his parents would find a spot near the construction site where his father worked. While his father built, his mother worked as the timekeeper for the site.
“And I never once heard her complain once about the moving,” he said. “Not even when Father called and told Mother to pack up the house, put the furniture in storage and sell the car because we were moving to Spain.”
The same thing that kept the family moving about every eight to 10 months, except for five years they spent in Spain and another five years in Albany, allowed the family to settle down in 1964. Tony Yaksh found work in the Atlanta area, and except for a one-year consulting job in Saudi Arabia, Nell Yaksh and her husband made Georgia their permanent home. But if they had to go, T.L. Yaksh has no doubt his mother would have made the transition without a fuss.
“She was just as happy in a house as she was in the trailer,” he said. “As long as she had her husband and her children were happy, she was happy. She believed happiness was where you found it.”
In addition to her husband of 70 years and her sons T.L and John, Yaksh is survived by her third son, Michael Yaksh of Lilburn; siblings Bucky Atkins, Clay Atkins and Betty Birkner, all of Texas; 11 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.
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