Melvin B. Nessel at 87; noted businessman, philanthropist
As he waited in Massachusetts General Hospital for results from his wife's cancer treatment tests, Melvin B. Nessel explained why the couple had donated $10 million to the facility.
"We felt that this is something we very much wanted to do and see while we were still alive," he told the Globe in June 1997. "It is so self-rewarding and wonderful that we can think [of] all the good things this cancer center will be able to do for so many people."
In a separate interview, he said of MGH, "We feel it's one of the finest hospitals in America."
Mr. Nessel, who took over a Cambridge shoe factory more than 50 years ago and turned it into an international company, died Feb. 15. He was 87 and had been suffering from health complications including a respiratory ailment.
As philanthropists, Mr. Nessel, his wife, Gail, and his late wife, Barbara, have donated millions of dollars to institutions ranging from MGH to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brandeis University, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla.
In 1997, Massachusetts General Hospital named its cancer services center for the Nessels in recognition of their generosity. Barbara Nessel died two years later.
In December 2003, Mr. Nessel and Gail Nessel pledged $6 million to Brandeis to help fund construction of a residence hall. Earlier that year, the Gail and Melvin Nessel Wing had opened at the Norton Museum, in recognition of the couple's $6 million donation, the largest cash gift the museum had received.
Years earlier, Mr. Nessel and Barbara Nessel gave the museum art they had collected for a half century, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, and Willem de Kooning.
"I realized they would have more use for it and it would mean much more in Palm Beach because they were lacking at that time in the late 1980s, more than in Boston," Mr. Nessel told the Associated Press in March 2003.
Born in Gainesville, Ga., Mr. Nessel began his career as a chemical salesman in Atlanta.
In the late 1940s he moved to Boston and opened Fenton Shoe Corp. in Cambridge a few years later, turning the single factory, with its few dozen employees, into a business that imported products from Italy, Spain, and Brazil.
"Mel Nessel was a character," Gail Nessel told the Palm Beach Daily News last month after her husband died. "He wasn't your typical three-button suit. He was fun, he loved life. . . . I was the luckiest girl in the world to be married to Melvin B. Nessel."
She added in the interview that Mr. Nessel had hoped his funeral would be "a celebration of his life. He didn't want anything said. He said, 'I had a wonderful life. If anyone cries at my service, they should be thrown out.' "
In addition to his wife, Mr. Nessel leaves a son, John of Lexington; and two grandsons.
A service has been held.
