Frank V. Nickels and Howard Hughes

City Safari – My grandfather and Howard Hughes

• Apr 21, 2021 Updated Apr 21, 2021
 
•  0

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Nazareth Hospital.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email
• Print
• Save

Several years ago, I learned that one of the legends of 20^thCentury America visited my grandfather sometime in 1936 or ’37. The occasion was the negotiation of land rights for the proposed building of Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia.

My grandfather, Frank V. Nickels was a Philadelphia architect of some note (his papers are archived at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

  

Because my grandfather was hired by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to design Nazareth Hospital, he was asked to try to get an agreement of sale from the owner of the land. Without land rights, the hospital could not be built. 

The owner of the land happened to be the 6’4” tall Hollywood playboy and movie producer, Howard Hughes,who had made a name for himself in 1928 when his comedy, “Two Arabian Knights,” won an Oscar. Hughes had also co-directed the 1930 film, “Hell’s Angels,” a film about WWI combat pilots starring Jean Harlow. Hughes’ inherited family wealth enabled him to buy all the combat planes used in the film. A natural daredevil and pilot himself, Hughes took part in the filmed combat dog fights in which 3 pilots died.  

As Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, the handsome Hughes had had affairs with Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth and many others. In later years, he had the habit of collecting beautiful women with movie star aspirations. It was his habit to put them up in apartments or small houses while paying their rent and daily expenses.

Initially Hughes may have shown a romantic interest in these women but over time this interest would wane. Hughes was content to call them once a month as he continued to send them checks, sometimes for years. Hughes was also attracted to male stars like Cary Grant and Randolph Scott but this part of his life was kept secret, given the tenor of the times.

  .

In 1939, two years after his meeting with my grandfather, he flew around the world and was honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City.

Let’s go back to 1937 when Hughes piloted his own plane to New York and then to Philadelphia’s Northeast Airport where my grandparents stood waiting for him on the tarmac.

My grandmother, Pauline Clavey Nickels, a former Irish opera singer from Wilmington, was probably wearing one of her big hats, and no doubt Frank was dressed in his herringbone best.

When Hughes arrived, pleasantries were probably exchanged, and then the group went off to a meeting near the grounds of the proposed hospital. What was said then can only be imagined. No doubt Frank and Pauline were a little star struck, especially when Hughes accepted Frank’s offer to go back to his home at 40 W. Albermarle Street in Lansdowne to have a look at the proposed hospital design.

I wonder if the group had lunch on the way to my grandfather’s house. Did Pauline ask about Rita Hayworth, or did Hughes inquire about the large bust of Dante Alighieri on Frank’s mantelpiece? Did Hughes let it slip that in two years he planned an around- the- world solo flight? What I do know is that both Howard Hughes and Frank Nickels were eccentrics, so I’m sure there was an instant bond.

Frank, one of four brothers and a sister, was born in 1891 to William Bartholomew and Dorothy G. Nickels (nee Belz) of Roxborough. As a young man, he was already setting his own style: he had a penchant for getting his shirts dry cleaned and then carrying them on hangers on various local trolleys. In 1914, he graduated from Drexel with a diploma in architecture and after that he established architectural offices in Center City at 15 S. 21^st Street, 225 S. Sydenham Street and later in the Land Title Building. His concentration was industrial and commercial projects, as well as schools and churches for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and in the Reading area.

Several years ago, I had an opportunity to tour two of his buildings, 1521 Spruce Street and the Frances Plaza Apartments at19th and Lombard Streets.

In the book, Philadelphia: A 300 Year History (1982), author/editor Russell F. Weigley documents the history of the Frances Plaza Apartments, now demolished. The apartments were constructed in the 1940s by Pearl and Benjamin Mason who won $150K in a sweepstakes. The apartments were built as affordable housing for African Americans.  

"[T]he Masons invested some $80,000 of their winnings in building the Frances Plaza Apartments at Nineteenth and Lombard Streets. Twenty-eight tenements were bought around that corner... Frank V. Nickels, architect, designed a three-story, cream-colored brick apartment house, with court, play space, and gymnasium so arranged that about 40 percent of the land remained open... The Frances Plaza Apartments are now called Rittenhouse Village [before demolition] and the play space is a parking area."

For many years Frank partnered with architect C.J. Mitchell, whose papers are also archived at the Athenaeum. Frank split with Mitchell when the latter challenged him in a bid to design a school for Saint Philomena School in Lansdowne. Somebody who knew grandfather told me that he never spoke to C.J. Mitchell again. 

    

Frank and Pauline Nickels raised three children, Frank, Thomas C (my father), and Joan in the Albemarle mansion. Frank’s bonsai garden behind the mansion was so famous that local Cub Scout Packs would organize tours of the space.

  

Both Hughes and Nickels were basically shy men with loner tendencies. My grandfather was not a joiner. As far as I know he never was a member of the Philadelphia AIA or the “must do” T Square Club, unlike CJ Mitchell who was a member of both.

  

Both men had a difficult time controlling their tempers.

          

When grandfather and Hughes met at 40 W. Albermarle Street it’s possible that they reviewed the Nazareth plans in the dining room at the long table for 16 situated under a chandelier. Grandfather’s drafting room was on the second floor overlooking the bonsai garden and the carriage house, so perhaps he and Hughes retired there.

  

“Frank, I like your plans for Nazareth, I really do,” I can imagine Hughes saying. “The design is modern with a touch of art deco and I like the way the building meets the sky. There’s something about your design that reminds me of aviation. I’ll tell you what, Frank. I’m going to give the Archdiocese of Philadelphia this land for free. You can tell them that down at the Chancery…Right after this I am going to fly off to one of my kept women on the west coast.”

    

Yes, Hughes admired the hospital plans so much he gifted the land to the Archdiocese at zero cost. Perhaps they sealed the deal with a drink, a toast of port or a round of straight up Manhattans whipped up by Pauline at the cocktail bar.

   

Grandfather must have told this story at Sunday dinner parties or at Thanksgiving and Christmas years after Hughes had become a recluse, living as a hermit on top of the Desert Inn Hotel Casino in Las Vegas or jetting around the world to hole up in other darkened hotel rooms with his ten inch long fingernails, and long gray hair and beard resembling the elderly monks on Mt. Athos. 

  

What is amazing to me, however, is that not long after Hughes’ visit to 40 West he opened the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But before that, in 1935, he designed the H1 Silver Bullet, the world’s fastest racing airplane noted for its sleek modern look. As I checked out images of the H1, I couldn’t help but think how the plane eerily reminded me of Nazareth Hospital. How can a plane remind anyone of a hospital?

I can only conclude by saying that the plane had a sleek modern look that conjured up the “feeling” of art deco.

 

AIDS and COVID

City Safari: The Covid vaccine brings back memories of the struggle for the treatment of AIDS

• Apr 14, 2021 Updated Apr 14, 2021
 
•  0

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email
• Print
• Save

Now that COVID-19 is slowly falling victim to “the vaccine,” it might be appropriate to reivsit the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. 

When AIDS exploded onto the scene in 1981-82, times were so frightening I sometimes wished that I could fall asleep and then, like Rip Van Winkle, wake up when it was all over.  

I first heard of AIDS on a street in Center City from Henri, an RN, who told me, “They just found out that [gay] sex causes the brain to rot.” The look in his eyes was one of sheer terror as he explained that he had read about the new disease in The New England Journal of Medicine. This was some weeks before the iconic New York Times article about a strange gay cancer. 

Naturally I assumed that Henri was playing me for a fool.

My friend, Steve McPartland, was in his mid-twenties and on the verge of what probably would have been a successful ice skaing carrer when he broke his back on the ice. I met Steve while working at Chester County Hospital while living in West Chester, Pennsylvania.  Not many years later, Steve became one of the first men in Philadelphia to contract AIDS. Reality hit home in a big way for me when I saw a picture of him in a hospital bed on the front page of the Philadelphia Gay News.

The year was 1983, well before there was a test to detect the virus or even a drug to ward off secondary infections of the immune system. It took Steve about two years to die. Although he eventually left the hospital, he became a common sight on the streets of Center City, hobbling along on his crutches, an AIDS buddy by his side. His slow demise was difficult to process. I last saw him on Spruce Street one summer still on crutches eating a vanilla ice cream cone.

     After Steve McPartland’s death, the names of the sick and deceased in the gay press seemed to quadruple. We were now in the grip of a plague, first known as Gay Cancer, then GRID (Gay Related Immune Defiency), and finally AIDS.

Albert Camus’ novel The Plague had nothing on this thing. A disease caused by sex that “eats the brain” and that puts ugly marks on the body was now causing some people to suggest that AIDS patients be quaranteened.

There were moments when many thought that gay men would be forced into medical camps.

Fast forward to 2012, namely to a middle row seat on a U.S. Airways flight from Philadelphia to San Fransciso. I was thinking of Steve McPartland while reviewing a program booklet entitle The Evolution of HIV/AIDS Therapies, a short panel disccusion due to take place at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California. The seminar focused on the progress achieved in HIV therapies, as well as the global challenges still to be met.

I went to cover the event as a journalist. The trip got me thinking of another friend who died of AIDS, Dr. William H. Miller, of Tacoma, Washington who was a Harvard med student when I met him one night in the Cambridge Common.

Bill Miller hailed from Ashville, North Carolina, birthplace of American novelist Thomas Wolfe, and attended Harvard Med with the aim of going into general practice. We were both 20 years old old.

In those days Bill Miller talked about what it was like to be a Harvard med student, like how his personal lab dissection shark fell from a shelf into his lunch, ruining a good Liverwrust sandwich. Sometime later, Miller left for  Washington state to do his residency program. I never saw him again although we kept in touch through letters and postcards. He’d send me pictures of his exotic travels to Vienna, Paris, or Central America. After that we lost touch, not an unusual situation when friends take divergent life paths.

But years later, in a Hitchockian twist, I met an elderly Seattle physican through a friend of a friend and on a whim, asked this physician if he had ever heard of the North Carolina-born doctor. The Seattle physician told me that he’d been a friend of Dr. Miller’s for many years, and had even gone to a party or two at Bill’s Washington state forest cabin. Then he told me that Miller had died of AIDS some nine years before. 

I knew there would be more memories once I was front and center at the Moore Foundation to hear Gregg H. Alton and Norbert W. Bischofberger, both from Gilead Sciences, and Sir Richard G.A. Feachem and Paul A. Volberding, from the University of California..

At the conference, Volberding jolted the audience with recollections about walking around San Francisco General Hospital in the early days and seeing the first person with Kaposi Sarcoma (KS).

 “It was literally the start of the epidemic,” he said. “It took a while before we realized it was an infectious disease, but once we did there was terror because we didn’t know how it was transmitted. So there was a sense of personal risk in dealing with the patients.”

It was a common pratice for men with AIDS to cover their KS spots with Clearasil tubes or Cover Girl maleup sticks but often the blemish scabs were so pronounced, it was impossible to cover them.

In the gamey world of pornographic films of the period, the reality of AIDS hit hard: Popular actor Eric Stryker, for instance, failed to hide the KS spots on his body despite a heavy application of makeup. Watching these old films, the effect is haunting and creepy. Viral infections like pneumonia, herpes and KS were secondary infections and they could only be treated with drugs that addresed these secondary symptons, but treating the immune system as a whole went unattended, meaning that the infections came back until they killed the patient.

KS was particularly devastating in that it was external, a blatant Scarlet Letter that told the world that you had the plague. Prior to AIDS, KS was mostly a skin condition seen in the very old Eastern European or Mediteraran men. First described in 1872 by a Hungarian dermatologist named Moritz Kaposi, non-AIDS related KS was seen as being caused or affected by infrequent bathing, or as a condition that hit people with a history of asthma and allergies. To date, AIDS-related KS is rarely seen in children and is most prominent in Africa and other underdeveloped countries.     

In the early days of the epidemic, health paranoia affected familes and destroyed relationships.  In Philadelphia and elsewhere, many heterosexual couples stopped inviting their gay friends to dinner, while some stopped seeing them altogether. Relatives stopped kissing their gay sons or siblings on the mouth; some even had worried looks on their faces when they kissed them on the cheeks, as if the virus hibernated in pores or blew out of the nostrils in the nose.

City dentists began to be wary of their gay patients and imagined weight loss when there was none. “You look awfully thin,” my Center City dentist at the time said to me. “Are you sure you are alright? Are you sure? Really?” This Q and A went on for several years. Many times, I felt he wanted me to say, “No, I am not alright,” so that he could tell me to go find another dentist. Because relatives and straight friends were always imagining weight loss when there was none, even these simple questions led to nights of unnecessary worry and panic because of the ‘What If’ factor.    

Discrimination and fear even resched into the corridors of hospitals, especially Ward 54 in San Francisco General, the so called AIDS wing, where so many young men died. Volberding recalled:  

“We heard horrible stories of patients who had to get up and change

their own beds during the night, the night sweats, and would

have to go beg for Tylenol from the nursing station.

 “People went blind,” Volberding continued, “and were unable to care for themselves, while caught in the middle was the social issue and the fact that they were gay and families would often descend on the deathbed and try to take over the care from the lover.”

Steve McPartland died before the discovery of AZT in 1987, even if AZT was no panacea but a drug with a host of unwanted toxic side effects. “AZT was a troubled introduction,” Volberding said, “it had to be given 4 hours around the clock.” 

AZT, in  fact, was developed by Burroughs Wellcome, a British Pharmaceutical firm, from on old compund they had sitting around on their shelves. AZT was developed in 1964 from herring-sperm extract as a possible cancer treatment but was quickly discounted as too toxic. But it was given new life when it was packaged as a drug that would help delay the onset of AIDS in healthy people  infected with the virus. When this happened, the Burroughs Wellcome stock surged to the heavens, in effect capturing the entire scientific community so that there were no scientists left to explore the possibility of other drug treatments. AZT at that time was the most expensive prescription drug manufactured, and the campaign supporting its useage was the biggest government medical research project in history. The drug itself was referred to by one AIDS activist, comedian Michael Callen, as “Drano in pill form.”  Patients who took AZT had to have weekly blood transfusions and suffered from nausea and insominia while their bodies wasted away to skin and bones.

When British scientists discovered that AZT could only provide 6 months of benefits before the treatment backfired and started killing the patient, the information was not only ignored by the American press but AZT continued to be encouraged by a government appointed physician, Margaret Fischl, who urged the 650,000 Americans infected with HIV to continue taking the drug despite yet another finding: a National Cancer Institute report that stated that at least one half of the people who had taken AZT for 3 years could expect to develop an aggressive form of lymphoma, a deadly cancer. According to an article in The Miami Herald in 1990, AIDS activists were onto the Burroughs-Wellcome stranglehold on the development of new AIDS drugs early in the game, and began calling Fischl a murderer. For years Fischl’s hospital answering machine was flooded with messages from familes of the deceased accusing her of killing their sons. 

Panel member Paul Volberding worked with Dr. Fischl at this time, and spoke out in defense of AZT then on a number of occasions. This fact was not mentioned or alluded to at the conference, although Volberding defended his early support of AZT.

“I remember how the world changed when AZT arrived,” he said in the 1990s. “It was a potentially toxic drug, but it brought the first real light of hope back into people’s eyes. It had demonstrable activity against HIV, and, most important, some AIDS patients who took AZT actually got better.”

  Many died, however, causing one playwright activist, Larry Kramer, who died in May 2020 to write the following 1988 open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci, an early proponent of AZT:

 “…Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer and should not be the guest of honor at any event that reflects on the past decade of the AIDS crisis. Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths

of thousands of Queers….”

1996 saw the first large trials of triple therapy, namely Protease Inhibitors being combined with various side drugs, that turned the disease around. These were the infamous cocktail drugs, sometimes amounting to thirty pills a day.

For many, like Steve McPartland and novelist Paul Monette (whom I interviewed by phone as he lay dying of AIDS in his home in Los Angeles), this development came too late.

But thanks largely to ACT UP, the  pharmaceutical world was forced out of its apathetic slumber. Steve McPartland and Paul Monette would be shocked, were they able to come back to life today, on hearing Volberding say how manageable the disease has become: “With my patients now who are motivated and take the drug, it is as easy to treat as hypertension.”

 

From Phindie: Religious Cults in Philadelphia

CULTURE LITERATURE

Religious Cults in Philadelphia: Interview with author Thom Nickels

 Christopher Munden March 30, 2021

Religious cults have marked every society throughout history, and Philadelphia has seen its share of peculiar groups. The city’s streets have seen such charismatic figures as Father Divine of the Peace Mission Movement, Anton Szandor LaVey of the Church of the Process, and Madame Blavatsky’s 19th-century Theosophical Society. In a new book, culture writer and sometime Phindie contributor Thom Nickels considers the history of religious cults in Philadelphia. We talked to Thom about From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami, now available fromAmerica Through Time publishers.

Phindie: What inspired you to write this book? 

Thom Nickels: I was partially inspired by the thought: If all religions are true, then there’s no true religion at all: Belief is just a sliding scale of subjectivity. As a young boy growing up Roman Catholic and going to Mass, I often wondered what if I had been born Protestant, Hindu, or Muslim. Would I have been just as convinced of the truth of my birthright faith as I was as a Catholic? I began to study the roots of various religions. I became a fervent agnostic at 19 but had a breakthrough experience at 23 which caused me to reconnect with my Catholic roots (though I later became Russian Orthodox).

What’s always fascinated me is how people fill the spiritual gap in their lives after turning away from organized religion, since work and career can only do so much. 

Phindie: How do you define a cult? What do you see as the line between religion and religious cult? 

Thom Nickels: In some circles of academia, the word ‘cult’ is never used. Instead, we hear terms like “new religious movement,” a cumbersome phrase that—thank God—has never taken off. I’d define a cult as an organization of followers that disband or die out when their leader dies, whereas in an established church, etc., a new leader—pope, bishop, rabbi—is elected or appointed. Cults harbor absolute authoritarianism, so forget about critical inquiry. A cult encourages unreasonable fears about the outside world. Financial records are also never revealed, and followers who leave are considered evil or in some instances tracked down and harassed, as was the case in Scientology until recently. The leader in a cult has ultimate “personal” authority which goes far beyond the abstract institutional power of a bishop in a church. Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy, for instance, would go up to his many male and female followers and tell them that they were being called to offer their bodies to him in a physical union. And everybody obeyed, even the most heterosexual of men.

Phindie: Do you think there’s something about Philadelphia that attracts cults?

Thom Nickels: William Penn’s emphasis on religious freedom made for a wide playing field in Philadelphia. Madame Blavatsky, called “the great Russian bear,” smoked 200 cigarettes a day and lived in a brownstone at 3420 Sansom Street (now the White Dog Café). In 1874, there were some 300 mediums in the city. Many belonged to different branches of Theosophy and most advocated strict vegetarianism.

Looking back to the 1970s and 80s, Philadelphia had a large New Age movement with magazines like New Frontier, Garland of Letters Bookstore, crystals, Reiki, meditation, yoga, and finding a guru who spoke your truth. There was the Church of the Process in the 1970s whose members wore long capes and handed out satanic info-leaflets in Suburban Station. I remember a tiny spiritualist church on South Broad Street. At 12th and Locust there was Polly’s Spinning Wheel Restaurant that served mediocre food but with each meal you got a session with a psychic reader. The place was packed with Center City office workers and CEOs.

In the 1980s and 1990s Philadelphia was also sprawling with quasi cults like EST and Lifespring, so-called consciousness-raising movements. EST and Lifespring “missionaries” would go into bars and clubs and make dates with people but instead of going out to dinner, you went to an introductory course where you were encouraged to sign up and open your wallet. 

Phindie: Was there something that surprised you when researching it? 

Thom Nickels: I was able to explore the life of Swami Virato, publisher of Philadelphia’s New Frontier magazine in the 1980s and early 1990s. Virato was initiated as a guru by the famous Osho Bhagwan Shree Rajmeesh. Virato was all about tantric sex, love, celebration, and humor. “Tantra doesn’t tell you to control your sexual urges to reach God,” Virato said, “but rather the opposite…”  Virato lived on South Street but left Philadelphia because he felt it was becoming overcrowded. Virato hated crack smokers and he made a controversial statement in the 1980s that “AIDS was a good method of population control.”  

Phindie: Can you share an interesting anecdote or tidbit you found in your research?

Thom Nickels: My research into the life of Father and Mother Divine of the Peace Mission Movement led me to interview the adopted son of Father Divine, Tommy Garcia, of Las Vegas, Nevada. It was Garcia who told me that Father Divine took him aside one day and told him that he was not really God but to “let the people believe what they wanted to believe.” 

Phindie: Was there something you saw or thought about recently that made now a good time to write it? 

Thom Nickels: As the times become increasingly secular, the national obsession with politics keeps growing. Politics for many people has become a kind of orthodox religion—with cultish overtones. But, really, a cult can be anything now; it can even be a manner of dress and “feeling,” such as living in Powelton Village or Mt. Airy. Avid pitbull lovers can even have a cultish adherence to the breed. Everything, it seems, is about branding now.

Phindie: Thanks Thom!

Purchase the book from America Through Time and other online stores.