21 August 2017, Monday; the eclipse

I’m calling this Laila’s eclipse since she left us a year ago today at about 10:00 AM (although they didn’t make it official until a day later when they stopped her oxygen). What a hole she left here. It seems to me that even the sun had a notch taken out of it in memoriam.

Eclipse or not, Laila still brightens my path every day, giving me a poke in the ribs when necessary, laughing -- or fuming -- at the caprices of humanity. One sign of her broader impact comes from the people working at our local market, one of whom recently said to me: “I want my marriage to be like yours.” 

Laila will not be eclipsed.

Jack Nilles

The mere facts about Laila’s life do not convey how important she was to so many people. In my case she was:

  my lover,
  my buddy,
  my muse,
  my mentor,
  my inspiration,
in short, the best parts of me.

Her infectious laughter will stay with me as long as I live.

All through our marriage she helped me, counseled me, talked me back to sleep in the middle of the night when I was fretting about something. She was my shrink. 

It’s hard to think outside the box, but Laila was good at it. She would prod me when I was in a rut, help me get out of it, and congratulate me when I was successful. If I had stuck to my midwestern upbringing, I’d probably now be a humdrum retired engineer/physicist somewhere. With Laila I embarked on a series of careers, first directed to space travel, then to rescuing civilization from some of the deadening effects of the industrial age.

Laila found our home base, just a few hundred yards and on the seaward side of the Tigertail ridge from where we lived, in the spring of 1963. It was just what we had been looking for: airy, great view, coastal climate, comfortable, next to a wilderness park and right in the west side of Los Angeles. Laila’s cousin Bernice secured it for us and we moved in on 3 June, 1963. We expanded it in 1990 to accommodate our home offices but retained its 1950s design philosophy. In all our travels around the world we have not found another setting where we preferred to live.

 We didn’t have any kids but not from lack of trying. Our mutual physiologies apparently were incompatible as far as the level of medical progress of the late 1950s went. But Laila was a great teacher and would have been a great mother because she had the patience, strength and wisdom to do it. She had already demonstrated those qualities in the Chicago school system before we met. She also showed them in helping raise her niece and nephew, both of whom have turned out very well indeed.

 Laila loved to go exploring new places, sights, and sounds with me, both at/near home and elsewhere in the world. We traveled extensively, both in the western US and abroad. Much of the foreign travel was on business; as a result we did less sightseeing and photography on those occasions — but still enjoyed the experiences of meeting new cultures and people. 

 I even took her along on some trips when I was in the highly classified space reconnaissance business. I often asked her to drop me off in the Pentagon parking lot – or some more obscure place – and to pick me up later. She never flinched at the task and was always there at the appointed time, even though she didn’t know whom I was seeing or what the trip was all about. She used the occasions to explore the surrounding countryside of wherever we were.

 In the mid-1960s Laila gave me sailing lessons for my birthday. Her intent was to provide a way to reduce the tensions brought on by my work in the space program. It worked like a charm. We bought a series of sailboats and spent many happy hours and days cruising Santa Monica Bay and the nearby Channel Islands. Laila loved those early morning sails when we were accompanied by flying fish and schools of porpoises. We sold the last sailboat when our work and travels related to telecommuting left us little time for sailing, although we still belong to our yacht club.

 We were what is now known as “foodies,” exploring the many types of cuisines found in Los Angeles. One of our dates before we were married was to eat sukiyaki at a local Japanese restaurant — in the days before Asian food and other cuisines became local norms. At home I became the chef, with Laila as the sous chef, exploring many types of cooking from around the world. We still have a pantry and spice shelves full of exotic ingredients.

 High quality classical music was the focus of Laila’s professional life. She did not suffer poor quality gladly. She was also a jazz enthusiast and promoted any genre of music where there was excellence in both composition and performance. She formed and kept reforming her trio and other combinations with the flute, and arranged chamber music concerts at Concerts at the Mount, Concerts West and all over southern California.

 In 1976 she recorded a CD, Music for Flute and Piano by Four Americans, to highlight contemporary American composers and celebate our country's 200th birthday. The final track from that CD, Aaron Copland's Duo for Flute and Piano, Lively with bounce, is the background music on this site. It epitomizes Laila's personality.

When she quit performing and turned to producing records with Jane Welton (Protone Records), she often had intense conversations with friends Abram Chasins, Nicolas Slonimsky and others about the relative merits of composers, performers and performances, both live and recorded. She loved getting things just right when recording, concentrating on how it should best sound and how to get the performer to produce it, take after take. She urged Constance Keene to record Rachmaninoff’s complete Etudes Tableaux and coaxed Jane into making two CDs featuring Ayke Agus, Jascha Heifetz’s erstwhile accompanist. None of these records are mass sellers but all are examples of excellence in performance and concept.

 This short excursion into Laila’s life still just hits some of the highlights. She was an unforgettable person and I will continue to miss her profoundly.

 Jack Nilles

Laila Padorr Nilles, musician, record producer and entrepreneur, left this world at age 91 on August 22, 2016. Born in Chicago on July 25, 1925, she grew up to become a flutist and earned three degrees at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. She also studied at the Juilliard School in New York and with Nadia Boulanger at the Ecoles d’Art Americain in Fontainbleau, France. She founded a chamber music trio, the Padorr Trio, in Chicago in the early 1950s and moved it to Los Angeles in 1955. The Padorr Trio were winners of the Coleman Chamber Music Award in 1956 and were members of the Young Artists League

She co-directed two successive series of chamber music concerts in the Los Angeles area: the first at Mount St. Mary's College called Concerts at the Mount (1958-60), the next in Santa Monica called Concerts West (1965-75). Both series emphasized promoting young artists and new music as well as the popular standards.

In the mid-1970s she became interested in recording her performances. As a flute soloist she recorded Music for Flute and Piano by Four Americans in 1976 providing an overview of often-neglected American composers. The background music on this site is from that recording. She then switched vocations from performer to record producer, joining Protone Records. She was co-producer of more than 40 (remember vinyl?) records, cassettes and compact disks, beginning in 1977 and extending to 2016. She became owner of Protone Records in 2005.

As part of her efforts to support young musicians she was a director of Design for Sharing at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1984 through 1989. She was a member of Friends of Music at the University of Southern California from 1984 to 1990 and of the Board of the American Youth Symphony from 1981 to 1988.

In her parallel career as an entrepreneur she often was called the "Mother of Telecommuting", a reflection of the years she encouraged and helped her husband Jack Nilles in his research on telecommuting, telework and their impacts. Laila is the one who encouraged him to leave his “rocket scientist” job in the aerospace industry and invent a new one at the University of Southern California; a position that allowed him to set up the first formal research into what he called telecommuting. That was in 1972.

Laila also helped organize JALA Associates, now JALA International. (She is the LA in JALA.) She participated in JALA’s activities around the world, giving or assisting in presentations about telework in the United States, Europe, South America, Australia and Southeast Asia. She was part of the management group of the European Community Telework forum in the 1990s. Through this period her sense of humor, perspicuity and broad understanding helped JALA navigate through many diverse projects.

She was a member of the Audio Engineering Society, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and of Musicians Union Local 47. She was listed in Who’s Who in the West, Who’s Who in Entertainment and Who’s Who in the World, beginning in 1989.

She was a sailor (California Yacht Club), a photographer and a world traveler. She loved listening to fine musicians and viewing art of all types. She spoke her mind about life, music and politics and shared it all with family and the friends she made all over the world.

All who have known her for her encyclopedic knowledge, her wry sense of humor, her loyalty, her insight and her musicianship will surely miss her. She leaves behind her husband, Jack Nilles, and many loving nieces and nephews and their progeny.