Frank Nitikman, Chicago lawyer, Lyric Opera extra, dead at 84
In a legal careet spanning more than 40 years, Frank Nitikman helped some of Chicago’s most prominent people plan their estates and safeguard their investments.
He also traveled the world, danced the twist with Chubby Checker and appeared as an extra in Lyric Opera productions — once, Plácido Domingo accidentally broke his nose during the second act of “Tosca.”
Mr. Nitikman, who had frontotemporal dementia, died Thursday. He was 84.
He grew up in Davenport, Iowa. His mother Janette was a concert pianist, and his father David owned liquor stores in the Quad Cities area and Rockford.
While in Hebrew school, young Frank served as a junior cantor. At night, he’d listen to Brooklyn Dodgers games on the radio, but he was still thrilled to meet Yogi Berra of the archrival Yankees during a trip to New York with other Quad Cities Talmud Torah students.
He enjoyed caddying. Sometimes, he’d play in a family golf foursome with his parents and his sister Nancy Nitikman.
“Frank had the ability to hit that ball straight,” said Jerry Esrick, a friend who grew up in Rock Island.
Mr. Nitikman debated at Davenport High School, winning state competitions and going on to nationals, was the lead in the senior play “Our Town” and played varsity golf.
At Northwestern University, he studied economics and was a debate champion, according to his wife Adrienne Drell, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter.
“He was absolutely one of the smartest people I ever knew,” said Craig Brown, a college classmate and fraternity brother who grew up with him in the Quad Cities. “When classes were over in the morning, he’d be in the library.”
He joined Phi Epsilon Pi, now Zeta Beta Tau, said Esrick, another fraternity brother. They drove East together to check out law schools. Esrick decided to go to Harvard and Mr. Nitikman to Yale.
Before finishing law school, he started working for McDermott Will & Emery and ultimately became a partner in the firm, where he specialized in estate planning, wills and trusts.
After law school, he served in the Army's Judge Advocate General’s Corps. In the Army, he befriended Don Kessinger, the future Cubs and White Sox shortstop, who later became a client.
He met his future wife as they searched seating cards for their names at a friend’s wedding at the Drake Hotel. She noticed his dapper attire, “red hair and his twinkling eyes. He was tall and funny and a great dancer.”
They got married in 1972 and took a six-week honeymoon to Australia, Bali, Hawaii, Japan, Macau, Malaysia and Thailand.
“He was totally supportive of my career,” she said. “He said, ‘Do what you always wanted to do.’ ”
Mr. Nitikman did pro bono work for the Illinois attorney general’s office, at times representing clients who were being bilked, according to his wife, who said he’d start by saying, “Your honor, I’m just a poor, desk-bound lawyer.” Then, he’d build a case with oratory and facts. “He really had this gift of persuasion,” Drell said.
As an extra at the Lyric, she said, “He did everything from shoveling up after the donkeys who were onstage in 'Don Quixote' to dressing in a flesh-colored body suit and writhing on the floor in ‘Elektra.’ ”
And there was Mr. Nitikman's memorable appearance as an extra — a supernumerary in opera parlance— in the Lyric's 1982 staging of “Tosca.” The opera star recounted the mishap in his book “Plácido Domingo: My First Forty Years.”
While singing, “I flung my head back," Domingo wrote. "I broke the nose of a supernumerary who was standing directly behind me. The poor fellow is a lawyer by profession, but he limited his suit to asking me for an autographed picture and inviting Marta and me to dinner with him and his wife.”
In 2007, they saw each other at a Ravinia Festival gala, where Drell said Domingo jokingly told him, "I think your nose looks much better since I broke it 25 years ago."
Mr. Nitikman and his wife enjoyed the short walk from their Highland Park home to Ravinia, where, some summers, they’d attend 30 performances.
And always they danced, including one time when, Drell said, “We won a twist concert sponsored by Chubby Checker, and we danced with him.”
He was president of the board of the Chicago Sinfonia chamber orchestra and a founder of the Chicago Council of Lawyers.
“He was so good at giving good legal advice and, at the same time, being a warm personality who was able to connect with so many types of people,” his colleague Joseph O. Rubinelli Jr. said. “He was a great mentor to me and many others.”
Colleagues sought his advice on their own wills and estate planning, said George Mann, a retired partner at their firm who said Mr. Nitikman handled his affairs and estate planning for his parents.
“Frank was an enormously talented, enormously conscientious, very serious person,” said Judson Miner, a fraternity brother and former roommate who went on to be City Hall corporation counsel under two Chicago mayors — Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer.
But Miner said he had one failing — as a cook: “When Frank was cooking dinner for himself one night and was trying to make [frozen] peas, my wife — then my girlfriend — said, ‘Frank, you have to take the peas out of the box’ ” before cooking them.
Mr. Nitikman was proud of the educational programs at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, where he chaired the board.
“There are always school buses lined up out front,” he once said. “That always gives me a thrill.”
After coming to love the charred, thin-crust pizza in New Haven, Conn., while in law school, he wound up investing in Piece, a New Haven-style outpost in Chicago.
Mr. Nitikman is survived by his wife and his sister. A funeral service is planned for 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at Weinstein & Piser Funeral Home in Wilmette, with burial at Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge.