By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO–Friends from many walks of life gathered to pay tribute to Laura Simon on Saturday night, November 23, in anticipation of her 108th birthday, which comes Nov. 26. If you can’t remember the date, check with Interim Mayor Todd Gloria’s office. He proclaimed Nov. 26th to be “Laura Simon Day in San Diego.”
At a party in the home of former KPBS Evening News Anchor Joanne Faryon (who now is working for the inewssource.org investigative reporting website) and her husband, biomedical researcher Les Tari, Simon was feted by so many people with nice things to say about her, I couldn’t help but wonder if we might reach her 109th birthday before all the speeches were completed.
The tributes began when Faryon passed around Acting Mayor Gloria’s proclamation to guests who took turns reading it aloud paragraph by paragraph…Simon was born Nov. 26, 1905, during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt… Her earliest memory of a news story was the sinking of the Titanic… She suffered from the Spanish flu, losing some of her hearing from that epidemic… She packed gifts for American troops in World War I… She voted for the first time in the 1928 presidential election… She was a lifelong learner, taking classes at UCSD and SDSU as a senior citizen…. She was an artist… The Braille Institute honored her at age 102… Later she became the oldest living author whose book is in the Library of Congress… She has appeared on KPBS Radio and television … She is the subject of two documentaries.
Simon’s son, Mayo, an 85-year-old New York City based playwright, invited comments from various people who have played roles in her life, cautioning them to keep their remarks “brief” — but Simon is a phenomenon who can open people’s throats and cause words to pour forth from them.
Kim Maczyk of Montezuma Publishing Company shared what she called the three “wow” moments she had experienced with Simon The first was when, in the process of publishing and publicizing Simon’s memoir, I’m Still Here, she saw how when Simon spoke to senior citizens. Simon “commanded the room.”
“The people in the room were just speechless,” said Maczyk. “They were so impressed with what she had to say.”
The second “wow” moment was when Laura spoke to a convention of 2,000 senior citizens, who spoke nary a word during her presentation, even though they had chattered during talks by previous speakers. When Simon finished speaking, she received a standing ovation — the largest applause of the day, according to Maczyk. On the stage with Simon had been former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “but the buzz that day was all about Laura.”
And the third “wow” moment was when after Maczyk told Simon that it was well night impossible to get her book physically into the Library of Congress (as opposed to the Library simply noting the book’s registration number), Simon called Library of Congress executives on her own, and persuaded them that they just had to have the book in the nation’s collection. After verifying Simon’s information, the memoir (which can be read on line on the San Diego Jewish World website) was indeed accepted for the honor.
Professor Mario Garrett, chairman of the gerontology department at San Diego State University, recalled how Simon once had called him to ask his help in getting her book published, and how he thought sarcastically “yeah, I have nothing better to do.” But that was before he actually met her. Simon, an inveterate worker of the telephone, called him back the following week, and eventually Garrett agreed to a meeting. He was immediately impressed with her, and got a graduate assistant to help get the book ready for publication.
To Simon, the professor commented: “You have stories about your uncle who had a Cadillac dealership, and then during the Depression he was going around selling vegetables door to door, and that resilience … you encapsulated in your book.” One of Simon’s secrets to a contented life, he said, is “she is happy about good things that happen — you are very good in reinterpreting negative experiences. You are very clever at that. It takes character and resilience to do that, Laura.”
Next up was Larry Zeiger, a retired teacher from Pt. Loma High School, who had met Simon after his own mother had moved to San Diego from Cleveland and had enrolled in a life-long learning class at UCSD. There she met Simon, whom she described as one of the most fascinating and remarkable woman she had ever met. His mother, now deceased, was pretty remarkable herself, having been one of the earliest female attorneys in Cleveland. The two women became fast friends, and as Simon was approaching her 100th birthday, Zeiger proposed to his students they should do a documentary about her. Three students went to her house to interview her, and “when she went to the bathroom to get something, they said, ‘she is incredible, this is amazing Mr. Zeiger!’ The film-making trio went on to film the 100th birthday celebration and the documentary continues to be shown today.
Simon was included in another documentary titled Over 90 and Loving It, made by Susan Polis Schutz and aired over most Public Broadcasting System stations around the country. Schutz’s associate on the film, Karen Bidgood, read a message from Schutz, who lives in Colorado, the state which elected her son Jared as a member of Congress. Schutz said that Simon’s “spirit, attitude and passion for life were so inspirational and she is so cute! Everything Laura said in our interview was poetic and elegant.”
Speaking in her own behalf, Bidgood said she was moved to tears by the way Simon at the end of the film talked about her life and future death. “I had to hold myself together,” she said.
KPBS Producer Natalie Walsh told of a time that both Laura and Mayo were brought to the station to do a radio broadcast on These Days with host Tom Fudge. Just as the live show was about to start, Simon announced that she needed to change the battery in her hearing aid. Now this may seem like a small thing to us listeners, but in radio land, it meant that until she finished there would be “dead air,” which broadcasters avoid at all costs. Fudge and his producers froze, but Simon calmly took the hearing aid out of her ear, opened it, popped a new battery into it, put it back into her ear, and the interview began. In doing that, admitted Walsh, she taught the broadcasters the necessity and value of patience.
The final person to speak, before Simon responded, was Ashley Gardner, executive director of the Women’s Museum of California, where one of Simon’s paintings and some of her sculptures are part of the collection. About six months ago, Gardner said, she had the chance to meet Laura, and “why wouldn’t you want to meet someone who has been on the planet for 107 years?” She described Simon as “walking, talking women’s history” adding that she is “an American story, when you think about this country, how it was put together, how we all came together. Laura’s is such an American story–of immigration, of persistence, of poverty, of someone saying ‘I want something better in my life’ and making that happen just out of sheer will. That is what makes this country so great, and that is what I love about Laura.”
For all the compliments that Simon received, I’m willing to bet that the one she treasured most came from her son, Mayo. Commenting that he had written a play about her, An Old Lady’s Guide to Survival, which recently has been presented in Italy, Mexico, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark and South Africa, he commented that his mother “is the most interesting person I know.”
Turning to his mother, he asked if she would like to say a “few words.”
“I have more than a few,” she responded.
But in fact, Simon kept her remarks brief. She thanked her hosts, and confided that she often is asked “How do you do it? How do you manage to get to be so old?” She says she answers people that “it was a long hard climb up ‘Montezuma’ Mountain. I climbed and climbed. I climbed for years to the top of this Montezuma, and the view was just absolutely wonderful.”
Reprising the comments which had in the documentary so moved Bidwell, she said, “We are like the flowers. They bloom and blossom to beauty. … We fade away and we reseed ourselves … I am not afraid of death because in reseeding yourself, you become one with the ground once more, and you are part of the world.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com