Huguette "Nicky" Picon Micozzi

Huguette Annie Victoria Picon was born on August 23, 1930, in Cannes, Maritime Alps, on the French Riviera, the second of two daughters born to Antoine Marius Picon (1898 – 1994) and Marguerite Victorine Bourely (1901- 1983). Antoine's father, Adrien, had come from Paris. After Adrien's parents died in a cholera epidemic while he was young, he joined the French Army in the 1880s during their explorations of Africa and served in North Africa. After the Army, he returned to LaBocca-Cannes, France, and married Anna Brun (whose family had a glass factory, and whose uncle served as town major) and he worked for the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean (PLM) Railway (now part of the French national railway).

Antoine served in the French Navy on a battleship during WWI (1914-1918) and in the British-French-US allied invasion of Russia in 1919 to try to combat the Bolshevik Revolution. He made many lifelong "White Russian" friends that the French Navy evacuated from Sebastopol on the Black Sea, including Princess Olga Potemkin, who remained friends of the family through the 20th century. Antoine married Marguerite Bourely in 1920, had a family and worked in his own studio as a wrought iron artisan. The Bourely family was active in building construction with the some of the first "high rise" buildings on the French Riviera. Antoine participated in this early "building boom" and made custom iron grates, fences, and decorative work for the villas going up on the French Riviera during the "Roaring 20's" for Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette McDonald, and others. Huguette remembers sitting on the laps of these and other visiting Hollywood celebrities. Antoine also sent work to New Orleans for the re-invention of the "French Quarter" which was really an early tourist development from the old Irish, German and Italian neighborhoods that cropped up in this major port city long after the French had left.
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Normal life was interrupted by WWII, in 1940, during which WWI veteran Antoine was a member of the French Resistance. Young Huguette carried messages in her laundry basket on her bicycle from the resistance about various activities to hide, transport and relocate Jewish refugees. In 1943, nearby Italy dropped out of the War as one of he Axis Powers and the Germans began direct occupation of Italy. The US Army Air Corps then bombed the railway (on which her grandfather worked) leading to Italy on the French Riviera, accidently destroying Huguette's home, whereupon she moved into the basement of one of her maternal grandfather's high rises.

Life resumed after WW II and Huguette began work as a fashion model, and working in a high couture French dress shop called "Artaban." She went to Paris and Strasbourg for modeling, and appeared in the French fashion magazine Elle. She was invited to travel to London, as reported in the London Daily Mail, but her father forbade her.

One day while dressing a fashion model in the store window of Artaban dress shop, a young American sailor from the US Sixth Fleet stopped by to try to speak with her. After a couple attempts, Huguette succeeded in having a conversation with Chief Petty Officer Edio Dominic Micozzi (1927 -2007), of Fairchance, Pennsylvania, who asked for her hand and her father's permission. They married in Fairchance, western Pennsylvania, on December 27, 1952, and Huguette quickly acquired the popular nickname "Nicky." Thereupon Nicky's new family moved around the country depending on Ed's work assignments: installing radar for NATO in Incerlik, Turkey; installing navigation systems on the new US operational F-4 Phantom jet; engineering the Lunar Excursion Model for the NASA Apollo moon landings; and developing early printed circuit board computer technology (early "micro-chips").

Each move to a new town for a new work project for Ed brought another child: Marc (1953) in Norfolk, Virginia, with the US Naval Base; Gerard (1958) in St Louis, with McDonnell Douglas Aircraft (now Boeing), Martine (1960) in Cinnaminson, New Jersey-Greater Philadelphia, with Radio Corporation of America (RCA, now General Electric), Carole (1965) in Winchester, Mass-Greater Boston, with the early "Route 128" technology corridor around Boston from the early influence of Harvard and MIT. The technology rapidly moved to California, as did Nicky and Ed and family. Nicky moved into her home in Arcadia CA in 1966 and she remained there for 50 years just as she wanted. The climate and environs reminded her of her home in the Maritime Alps of southern France.

After raising her four children, Nicky used her professional skills and early exposure to Hollywood celebrities to work with Universal Studios in Public Relations. She gave personal tours to high-ranking French-speaking visitors, and was consulted on scripts for cultural accuracy and translations from English into French by studio head Lew Wasserman and others. She enjoyed taking her grand-daughter Alicia (born 1983) Micozzi on "VIP" tours of Universal Studios during the 1980s and 1990s.

After the death of Ed in 2007, she remained a vibrant active woman in the Arcadia-Monrovia-Sierra Madre community, with many dear, local friends. Nicky enjoyed many visits with her children, Martine of Washington, DC, Gerard and Tracey and their son Nicholas of Glendora, and Carole and her daughter Samantha and son Christian of the San Francisco Bay Area. For several recent summers, during her birthday celebrations in August, Nicky visited with son Marc, daughter-in-law Carole O'Leary and grand-daughter Alicia, at their new summer home on the ocean in Rockport MA, nearby where the entire family had spent several happy early summers from 1962 to 1966.

Nicky lived as a vibrant, independent woman up to her last day, sending and receiving daily email messages with her children, and getting out to see her friends and for social activities. She never spent a day in the hospital other than maternity visits to deliver her four fortunate children.

A memorial mass will be held Friday, July 15 at 12:00 PM at St. Rita Catholic Church, 318 N. Baldwin Ave., Sierra Madre, CA 91024 with a reception to follow.