Golden Couples of Pacific Palisades

Jay and Rita Nickels: 1963

It is hard to believe that over 50 years ago our wedding announcement was published in the Palisadian-Post and that our life has been linked to this wonderful community ever since.

  Jay and I met at a wedding reception in the spring of 1962, a few hours after I arrived in L.A. from Panama to attend a family wedding in Westwood. The reception where I met Jay took place a couple of weeks before my cousin’s wedding, but fate had it that we would meet at a wedding.

At the time, I had been attending college in Germany, but when the Berlin Wall crisis erupted, my father asked me to come back to Panama for Christmas. Then he asked me to accompany my elderly aunt to my cousin’s wedding in L.A. I never made it back to Germany!

The day I met Jay (he happened to be at the wedding because he was friends with the bride and groom), we spent only a brief time together at the reception, but then joined a large group of the younger wedding guests who decided to go dancing at Cisco’s in Manhattan Beach that evening. This is where Jay and I had a better opportunity to meet and dance and talk.

When he learned that I had come to L.A. for a 30-day visit, he offered to come by the next day and take me on a tour of the city—with my cousin and her fiancé. From that point forward we started to see each other.

A few days later, my aunt hosted a party at her home in Westwood in honor of my cousin who was getting married. Here I met the manager of Security Pacific Bank in Pacific Palisades, who had been my cousin’s boss at the bank’s Westwood office. He was a family friend, and when he learned that I was fluent in French, he offered me a job. Henry Miller, who lived on Ocampo, was an important client and his publishing company was in France.

I jumped at the opportunity with great excitement—and life in the Palisades began. Within a week I had met my future husband and had a job!

Jay and I began dating crosstown; I lived with my aunt and he was finishing his last year at the School of Architecture at USC, but he often came to meet me at lunch. The Hot Dog Show and Will Wright’s Ice Cream became frequent stops. As a child, Jay had lived in Malibu and his parents would drop him on Saturdays at the Bay Theater, so for the two of us the Palisades was a place that felt like home.

We were married by Monsignor O’Flaherty at St. Monica’s Catholic Church on September 14, 1963.

Our first home as a married couple was in Coronado, since Jay had to complete his active duty after graduating from USC. Coronado is a community much like the Palisades, so we adjusted quickly to the lifestyle and our daughter Rita was born in that beautiful place.

After returning to Los Angeles, we rented an apartment in the Palms area, but knew it was short-term as our goal was to live in Pacific Palisades. We purchased our first home on Galloway Street in 1966. Our daughter Lauren was born a year later and everyone in our family participated with the restoration project to get the home ready. Not enough can be said about the invaluable love and welcoming support we received from our Palisades neighbors, from babysitting groups to block parties, walks to enjoy the Fourth of July parade and all in a wonderful family atmosphere. Beautiful memories that we treasure to this day.

By 1969, our daughter Rita was attending Corpus Christi School and Lauren was at the Methodist Preschool on Via de la Paz. (They both later graduated from Louisville High.) Jay was working for the architecture firm of Honnold & Rex—where he later became a partner—and I started work as a realtor, which was a natural transition now that we were homeowners and this community offered so much to young families.

Jay continued his architecture practice and also started teaching architecture at USC, where he taught for about 18 years. He retired from practice in the 1990s but continues with his academic work and is presently on the architecture faculty of Woodbury University in Burbank.

I continue my work as a realtor in this community, now at the local Coldwell Banker office, after managing one of the Jon Douglas Company offices until he sold his firm to Coldwell Banker. For me, the Palisades is home and it’s wonderful to see others make it their home too!

Our daughters have relocated. Rita lives in Miami, where she went to graduate school (after receiving her undergraduate degree from UCLA) and met her husband, Ron Magill. She is a physical therapist and owner of Physical Therapy Associates, while Ron is Director of Communications at Zoo Miami. They have two children: Sean is in his second year of college and Alexis is completing her last year in high school.

Our daughter Lauren attended UC San Diego, where she met her husband Kerry Guinn, and lives in Carlsbad. She is Marketing Operations Director for the Active Network, and Kerry is a Senior Field Service Engineer for AB SCIEX. Their daughter Katie is starting her second year of college and Kevin is finishing high school.

Despite not living in the Palisades, our daughters have a strong bond to this community and our grandchildren feel very much at home when they visit, walking around the Village, the farmers’ market on Sunday and enjoying all the local activities.

As readers of the Palisadian-Post since our early years in the Palisades, we often joked about some day making the page of the “old people” when reading about the Golden Couples.  It does not seem possible that 50 years have gone by, but it is now our turn to celebrate as happy and proud members of a community that has played such a strong role in our life.