Chapter One
The One That Got Away
Jonathan Nyce was the third consecutive namesake in his family. Always fascinated with his ancestry, he once researched his family tree, going back to the Eighteenth Century, when a female member of the family married a native American Indian.
His grandfather Jonathan Nyce had come from Trappe, Pennsylvania, and was a builder. His father, Jonathan Jr., had been born in 1925, growing up around Collegeville, a rural blue-collar northern suburb of Philadelphia.
The Nyces were a prominent family in the area, and Jonathan Jr.s Uncle Wesley was a daredevil stunt pilot, with his own touring aerial show. In 1939 hed bought the Pottstown Limerick Airport for the knock-down price of $50,000 before becoming a test pilot for the American Air Force.
“Uncle Wes tested B49s,” said his nephew proudly. “One time he didnt bail out in time, and crashed into a dump. . . . he wasnt hurt though.”
Unfortunately, Wesley Nyces luck didnt hold out. In 1948 the fearless flyer was killed during an aerial display, when his stunt plane failed to come out of a roll.
“It was a tragedy,” said Jonathan Jr. “He was killed in front of his family.”
Jonathan Jr. also held a pilots license, but joined the U.S. Navy as a teenager, during the Second World War. Soon after his discharge in November 1945, he met a pretty young girl of Polish descent named Emma Dusea, at a local dancehall. The two found much in common, sharing a passion for ballroom dancing, and were soon dating.
“We met dancing,” said Emma. “And weve been going to dances ever since.”
On February 26, 1949, they married in Delphi, Pennsylvania, and settled in Skippack, Pennsylvania, where the mechanically gifted Jonathan Jr. found a job running a hosiery mill.
“We had ninety-six machines,” he remembered. “I guess you could say I designed things, and I made special stockings for showgirls.”
Before long Emma became pregnant, and on May 26, 1950, Jonathan Wesley Nyce was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Named after the family flying ace, he was the first of four sons Emma would bear Jonathan Jr. Two years later David was born, followed by Michael in 1955, and their youngest son Richard came two years later.
Money was tight in the Nyce household and Jonathan Jr. often had a tough time making ends meet on the scant wages of a stockingmaker. So when Jonathan was four, the family moved to Gettysburg, where his father found a better paying job at another mill, as well as moonlighting for several others for extra money.
Later Jonathan would often tell a fanciful story of how in 1953, his father narrowly missed making a huge fortune.
“My father influenced me because of something he didnt do,” Nyce would cryptically explain to U.S. 1 newspaper in 1999. “He worked around the clock one night to design the machinery to knit the first pair of pantyhose. But because he had a new family, he was unable to capitalize on that discovery, whereas his partner was able to run with it.”
According to Jonathan, his father then gave him savvy business advice, which he had lived by ever since: That if he was ever in a similar position, he should “capitalize” on the opportunity, as there may not be another.
“I honestly think thats one of the things that later drove Jonathan,” said his future mentor at East Carolina University, Dr. Wallace R. Wooles. “He wasnt about to make that mistake again.”
Today his father, now 80, lays no claim to inventing the first pantyhose-manufacturing machine.
“I dont know,” he says wistfully. “I doubt that I invented it.”
In 1955, the Nyce family moved again, this time to Norristown, and Jonathan began first grade at St. Patricks School, where he made his first Catholic communion.
As a child, Jonathan was a loner, preferring his own company to that of the other children in his primary school. He had difficulty adjusting socially, and was a serious, quiet boy, who largely lived in his own make-believe world.
But he had a vivid imagination and loved to write stories and poetry.
“He wrote beautiful poems,” said his mother, Emma. “He was very good.”
As a young child, Jonathan was fascinated by science, and was always doing experiments of one kind or another. He dreamed of becoming a doctor.
“I guess in our family, pilots and doctors are the main occupations,” said his father, as his sons would later be split between both professions.
In 1957, the Nyce family finally settled down in a large ranch-style house on Mill Road in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where Jonathan Jr. and Emma live to this day.
“We moved here when Jonathan was seven,” said his mother. “Our baby [Richard] was just born.”
Growing up, Jonathan and his brother Michael both suffered from acute asthma and were prone to attacks at any time. It was a terrible physical handicap for a child, making Jonathan feel vulnerable and insecure.
“Its hard to imagine something worse than not being to breathe,” he would later explain.
By the time he was 12 years old, Jonathan was six feet tall, standing head and shoulders above his grade school friends. But he soon put his height to his advantage on the school basketball court, where he discovered a passionate love of the game.
Jonathan played center in grade school and also regularly played pick-up games with his father and three brothers, in their Mill Road back yard.
“Wed play a lot of basketball,” said Jonathan Jr. “We had a lot of fun.”
When the tousle-haired blonde boy started at Methacton High School, directly behind his home, he was as “skinny as a beanpole.”
Jonathan was “little better than average” academically, according to his father, and his favorite subject then was English. The future medical pioneer displayed little obvious aptitude for the sciences at this point.
“He loved to write,” said his father. “He was always interested in the medical field and then he got more interested as he got older.”
Methacton had a solid reputation as a quality public high school, with a flexible curriculum tailored to each pupils needs.
Jonathans gigantic sizehe would ultimately reach six feet, four inchesset him aside from the other boys. But beneath his quick wit and geniality lay a sensitive, painfully shy boy, who never truly felt comfortable in social situations.
“He was the biggest guy in the school,” remembered Eugene Hallman, who became close friends with him in seventh grade, when they took several classes together. “He wasnt one of the most popular kids in school, but we got along.”
Jonathan was soon picked to play for the schools basketball team, the Methacton Warriors, where he proved an effective defensive center guard. He also represented the school at tennis, as well as being active in student government and selling advertising for the student newspaper, Smoke Signals.
His best friend at Methacton was Samuel Colville, who also happened to be the schools second tallest boy. According to their classmates, both boys vied for the attentions of a pretty girl named Sue Wess