Nancy S. Magoteaux

Nancy Magoteaux was fourteen years old when she sat next to her sister in the bed of a pickup truck, laughing hysterically as it raced through an open field. Their feet were dangling over the edge of the open tailgate as their mother pushed down on the gas. A fifty-foot rope tethered the back of the truck to an ultralight, which is basically a go-cart with wings. In the pilot’s seat of the ultralight, being dragged behind them, was their father, bouncing up and down, hoping to fly.

Nancy’s father purchased the half-buggy half-aircraft during one of his midlife crises, according to Nancy. It didn’t have an engine, but that didn’t stop him from seeing if he could still get it off the ground.

Everyone had their doubts. The ride, at that point, was nothing more than a spectacle as they watched him struggle to keep control atop the uneven terrain. Another dad stunt, they thought, that quite literally wouldn’t get off the ground. But then, the right bump at just the right moment gave him enough air to go up and stay up. Nancy said the rope let him get up to about thirty feet as he flew behind them like a kite on the end of a string.

“We were all dying laughing. He’s just flying around behind this pickup in a field, and he’s holding on for dear life. You can tell from the look on his face that he was more surprised than anyone that it actually worked.”

Now we all know that apples don’t fall too far from the tree. Even though Nancy’s sense of adventure is a little more subdued, she still has her moments. During college, she and her sister took off for about a month to backpack in Europe. They started in Greece, then wandered through Austria, Switzerland, Germany, eventually ending in Ireland. The questionable hotels made the trip quite eventful, especially that one that required them to barricade their doors because there were no locks. And of course, they’ll never forget climbing the wrong tower in Switzerland only to see the tower they actually wanted to climb 1,000 mistaken steps later.

More recently, Nancy happened to be in Pompeii with her husband when she learned that she passed the Bar Exam. The joke was that she would either be jumping into the volcano or running down it to celebrate with wine after she got the news. They chose a bottle of Prosecco, but to this day, Nancy insists that things could have ended up differently had she not run through the streets of Rome at 4am the day before to shake the Pope’s hand.

It’s interesting to think about how this sense of adventure developed in a girl from Waynesburg, Ohio, a one traffic light village southeast of Akron. It used to have a grocery store before it went out of business, making a McDonald’s the town’s main attraction. You’re probably thinking she wanted to escape, but Nancy has nothing but great things to say about the place where she grew up and the influence it had on her.

Nancy, like her parents, is definitely a DIYer. She learned to sew in 4-H, and years of hanging around her father taught her to build things and solve all the problems that arise in the process. The outdoor kitchen at her home was designed and built by Nancy, and so was their custom kitchen island. If Nancy wants new curtains or needs a Halloween costume for their daughter, she just makes them herself.

These do-it-yourself skills always led Nancy to think that she’d be an engineer of some sort. In fact, the no-brainer path in life was for Nancy to become an engineer, then go work for her father’s excavation business, but Nancy wanted a bigger challenge. After watching her parents build a thriving business from the ground up, it inspired Nancy to do the same thing, but in her own way. It’s one of the reasons she moved to Cincinnati; to start from scratch and build a career out of nothing — the ultimate DIY project.

It was Nancy’s aunt, a lawyer out of Akron, and her fancy shoes that inspired Nancy to choose law. Nancy’s attraction to opulence growing up earned her the name Fancy Nancy long before the popular children’s book was written. Anything that shined, sparkled, or otherwise blinged, always got Nancy’s attention, and so when she would visit her aunt and see those sleek business suits and high heels, it inspired a more cosmopolitan path in life for Nancy; one of big cities and big business, and of course, her own pair of fancy shoes.

Today, Nancy makes the trip up north to visit family about once a month. Her father graduated from flying go-carts to flying helicopters. He actually acquired an old LAPD helicopter equipped with a PA system, and his latest hobby is to fly around Waynesburg telling people to come out of their homes with their hands up. It’s enough to make Nancy laugh, and wonder if she should have gotten into criminal law at the same time.