A Tribute to Fred Nicholas
On May 30, 2025, Frederick M. Nicholas turns 105 years old. Other people occasionally reach this milestone, but very few can claim a century-plus life as extraordinary as Fred’s – distinguished not only by an amazing breadth of experience, but even more rarely, by a combined sense of compassion, social concern, and cultural responsibility demonstrated time and again. War hero, lawyer, businessman, benefactor and philanthropist, civic leader, adored family man – Nicholas has lived large. His friends are legion, for good reason.
The forces that shape courage, selflessness, and commitment – hallmarks of a life of greatness -- are mysterious. There’s no way to predict whether the first-hand ordeals of wartime, for example, will produce heroism or cowardice. The former characterized Nicholas’s military service in World War II, and bravery and a commitment to the larger good became the key elements underlying his subsequent achievements.
In 1941, America called. It needed him. He went. As an Army officer, he pursued Rommel across North Africa and participated in the invasion of Sicily, driving the Germans out of Italy. In 1945, he was shipped to the Philippines to prepare for the invasion of Tokyo. Today Nicholas is one of the oldest surviving World War II veterans, and, with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, one of the most decorated.
But perhaps the most formative episode during his military service was his stint as an M.P. in a Japanese-American re-location camp at the Tanforan Race Track near San Francisco. Appalled by the suffering at hand, at great peril the 21-year-old Nicholas smuggled the internees food, other essentials, and belongings from their homes. The experience left him with an indelible moral compass, and taught him that the individual citizen acting out of a sense of justice could make a profound difference in the lives of others. From this sprang his lifelong commitment to social and civic activism.
After his war service, Nicholas worked as a journalist covering the longshoremen’s strike in Hawaii, and then he earned a law degree. In Los Angeles he became a successful attorney specializing in real estate law and development, but he soon realized that he could apply much of his private-sector expertise to the public sector. Inspired by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who urged lawyers to give back to society, Fred founded— in a one-room office, with his own funding— Public Counsel, providing free legal services to abandoned children, homeless families, veterans, senior citizens, consumer fraud victims, and nonprofit organizations serving low-income communities. Today, with a 140-member staff and thousands of volunteers, Public Counsel is the nation’s largest resource of its kind.
Characteristically, Nicholas didn’t name Public Counsel after himself, preferring to act quietly without attracting attention. As with everything he undertook before and since, he believed in simply doing the right thing.
This selflessness came to the fore in the 1980s, when Downtown Los Angeles, like the Army decades before, called. Nicholas’s combined legal and real-estate development skills were precisely what was needed to help overcome a prolonged stasis in the City’s cultural arena. Nicholas promptly volunteered his expertise, and over the next twenty years he led the creation of two of Downtown’s landmark projects, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Both brought Los Angeles to the national and international vanguard of contemporary architecture and culture.
At MoCA, Nicholas used his customary diplomacy to deftly negotiate the shoals of competing personalities among the founding trustees. Together with director Richard Koshalek, Nicholas made the fledgling museum a reality. He led the Board during the glory years of acquiring major collections and building the endowment. Under his aegis, MoCA quickly became one of the world’s most acclaimed museums of contemporary art.
This success set the stage for Nicholas’s crowning cultural achievement in Los Angeles: his leadership throughout the design and development of the Walt Disney Concert Hall – arguably the greatest architectural masterpiece in the City’s history. As chair of the Walt Disney Hall Concert Committee beginning in 1987, and operating largely behind the scenes (again, pro bono), Nicholas adroitly assembled working groups drawn from various constituents to select an architect and acoustician, raise funds, and formulate the building process. His architecture selection committee united the impeccably credentialed heads of LA’s top museums and architecture schools. They awarded the project to Frank Gehry, who had hitherto been bypassed for major commissions in his own hometown. As much as anything, Fred’s advocacy enabled Gehry to invent the magnificent edifice that now sails at the corner of Grand Avenue and First Street.
Never during his eight-year tenure at Disney Hall did Nicholas ask to have his name placed on any of the building’s exterior or interior spaces. The finished masterpiece -- and the resulting leap in the international stature of music in Los Angeles -- were his reward. With this achievement, Fred joined the generation of great civic leaders who emerged in the 1980s to establish Los Angeles’s standing as a world capital.
He then took his skills to other cities, with similar acclaim. He developed the $900 million Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington D.C.’s largest building after the Pentagon. And he returned to the Tanforan Race Track in San Francisco, where he built a shopping center and dedicated a memorial to the Japanese Americans confined there when the site was a re-location camp. As ever, he masterfully negotiated the labyrinthine details inherent to these massive projects—orchestrating personalities, positions, power, and funds to reach the desired outcomes.
Perhaps Fred’s finest achievement, however, is the one best known by those in his private sphere: adored family man. Throughout his life, Fred has exemplified the roles of patriarch, husband, father, confidante, supporter, and bestower of limitless affection to his family. His love is returned by all, and by the many friends fortunate to be admitted to his closest circle.
Throughout his extraordinary life Fred has wrought positive outcomes in everything he’s undertaken. Everyone he has encountered, past and present, has benefited from his indomitable spirit and grace. Immeasurably more than most, Fred has truly made the world a better place.
May, 2025
