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NICHOLS, Christopher Perry (b.1938)

ProfessionsStage Director

Oral Histories

OH 1487

Stage director. His recollections of his father, the artist Perry Nichols. Growing up at the family house/studio on Forest Park Road, Dallas, Texas, in the 1940s; his father’s first wife, Mary Nell Brooks; his description and identification of the arts people who visited his father’s studio; his father’s conversion of a church on Cole Avenue in Dallas into an apartment/studio in the late 1940s; his parents’ divorce, 1948; his father’s career and commissions to do murals in the late 1940s; commissions with Interstate Theaters, Sears Roebuck, Baker Hotel, Crozier Technical High School, and the Belo Corporation for the Dallas Morning News Building; reminiscences of Elizabeth Akin, George Dahl, Reid McBride, Donald Vogel, Olin Travis, and Golda Andrews; his father’s marriage to Akin, 1950-56; his father’s affair with Diana Hamon; the role of Jerry Bywaters on his father’s career; “The Dallas Nine”; the house on Noel Road and the social life there; the breakup of his father’s relationship with Hamon and subsequent marriage to Marty Hawn; his father’s alcoholism and death.