The Boston Globe

One of Radio’s Most Familiar Voices Discusses His Early Years and Passion For Chicago Sports

Sheryl Julian

June 6, 2000

A comedian's son feels obliged to deliver humor in awkward moments, writes journalist Scott Simon. So, sitting in the back of a taxi en route from Logan Airport on a rainy day, Simon calls a waiting reporter on his cell phone and goes into a routine: about his canceled flight from Springfield, Ill., Boston's tight taxi situation, driving through the Big Dig, and the other passenger picked up in the North End moments earlier. "She's about to deliver!" says Simon. "Triplets!"

Coming from anyone else, this would hardly be funny. But from Scott Simon, National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition Saturday" host for the 15 years it's been on the air and one of the most familiar voices on public radio, it's amusing. It has to do with perfect timing, the flawless delivery of an old show-biz hand, and an exuberant laugh. And that familiar voice - rich, lyrical, friendly, and lively, with a flat (but not too flat) Chicago accent - makes anything worth listening to. When he does arrive, Simon turns out to be stylish, easily amused - even at his own expense - and a good mimic. When he smiles, his eyebrows form horizontal commas, as if he's putting his Peter Lawford eyes in quotation marks. What has brought him here is "Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan" (Hyperion), in which he aches and celebrates with his hometown teams: the Cubs, White Sox, Bears, and Bulls. His own story is woven into vignettes about onetime baseball announcer "Uncle Jack" Brickhouse, former Bears coach Mike Ditka, former Sox owner Bill Veeck, Michael Jordan, Mayor Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson, beeeauuutiful Wrigley Field, and onetime Mousketeer Annette Funicello (a boyhood crush).

On the air, Simon is NPR's regular guy, the epitome of the Midwest. He has no airs, is incredibly genuine, smart, and always engaged. Before asking difficult questions (he prefaces them with "Forgive me"), Simon practically apologizes and then peppers his interviews with "Mercy!" and "God bless!"

In person, in a navy gabardine suit with a red polka-dot pocket square and red socks, Simon doesn't have the aw-shucks quality he has on air. He is as earnest as he is on the radio, but more lighthearted. And his laugh is infectious. On the other side of the interview table, he's surprisingly forthcoming.

Early models

"I am the son of the funniest man and the most beautiful woman in Chicago," he writes. His easygoing Jewish comedian father, Ernie, who never saw success, drank too much. His Irish mother, Patricia Lyons, an actress, was the daughter of a bigoted Chicago policeman with "station house vocabulary" who stopped talking to her when she married Ernie. The couple divorced when Scott was in first grade. "Through their wounds and turmoils, my parents remained impeccably respectful of each other, and kind to me," he writes. When Scott was 16, Ernie Simon died at 48.

Simon, who himself just turned 48, says quietly, "This was a birthday freighted with significance for me. It's fine now, but that was a rough two or three days."

Charming and funny, Ernie Simon was a serious sports fan who was full of wisdom, says his son. He recalls his father intoning show-business lines like, "Dress for the gig you want, not the one you have." (Which occurred to Simon when he met Jordan, who was still accessible in the locker room, "knotting one of his gorgeously opalescent Italian ties.") Though he lived in awful places, the adoring Ernie was always cheerful. His son once helped him cover the floor of a room he rented over a beauty salon with newspapers rather than carpeting. The funnies became curtains. Scott Simon describes pulling away the Al Capp strip to check the weather. "Newspapers work just as well as carpets, Ace," his father told him. "You can always learn something new, just by reading the floor." Ernie Simon often sat up at night reading and drinking. As an adolescent, his son found vodka labeled "stomach medicine" in the bathroom cabinet.

"There was a guidance counselor when I was in high school who urged me to grapple with the difficulties of having a drinker in the family, a divorce, and all that sort of thing," he says. "It's not as if I avoided it. I just don't think I had the trauma that she assumed I would have."

Simon, who is still friends with the boys he grew up with, had great friends all through school, whom he'll meet again at a reunion in Chicago later this month. "I'm blessed to have friends who date back that long in my life," he says. "I have a lot of good friends. My mother has a genius for friendship."

He describes his mother as "a dark-haired version of Grace Kelly." After the divorce, she married Ralph "Sparky" Newman, a man Simon admired and adored. Newman, who once played second base in the minor leagues, was an Abraham Lincoln scholar and book dealer. He appraised the papers of several presidents, including Richard Nixon, for whom he falsified documents to allow Nixon a tax break. In 1975, Newman was indicted and fined $10,000.

At the time, Simon was a reporter for Chicago public television. "It was all over the papers," he says. "We decided it would be best if I took a leave." Shortly after NPR launched "All Things Considered," Simon became its Chicago reporter. Since then, he has covered Kosovo, Central America, Ethiopia, the Gulf, and Sarajevo.

Love of the game

In 1985, Simon helped create "Weekend Edition." The idea was that it would sound like Chicago, "like it came from somewhere, and stood for something," he writes. Early on, they decided that " `All Things Considered' is Harvard-Yale. Our show was Northwestern-Notre Dame."

Simon didn't intend for his own story to be part of "Home and Away," but while he was writing, he kept returning to Chicago to see his stepfather, who was ill. Newman died just after the Bulls won their sixth NBA world championship.

"At first, it seemed like a lark of a book," says Simon, who writes essays and appears as a commentator on PBS and hosts BBC specials. He has known important Chicago sports figures since he was a boy. Cubs and Sox announcer Brickhouse was his father's best friend, and Simon also knew former Cubs manager Charlie Grimm. His stepfather watched all the games and his mother - ever the good sport - was also a fan. She called players "those darling boys." When the Bears went to Super Bowl XX, she hosted a party for which she made gingerbread bear cookies, each with an orange and blue number. She stamped out one much-larger bear for 300-pound lineman William "The Refrigerator" Perry (number 72).

Among Simon's stories is one about the Bulls nicknaming general manager Jerry Krause "Crumbs" behind his back. Simon seems tickled to report that Krause dribbled everything he ate on his ample gut, where it stayed. Once after a game, Simon tried to interview Krause, who brushed him off. "I tried to avert my eyes from his paunch, but after all the stories - I had to glance. No crumbs. But there was a tawny blotch crusting on his blue oxford shirt between the first and second buttons up from his belt. If I had to guess, I'd say mustard."

Simon is taken with former Bulls coach Phil Jackson because of the way he handled his players, particularly Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman. The same reverence is held to former Bears coach Ditka. After his Super Bowl win, Ditka went to appear on "Saturday Night Live!" Simon was working at NBC at the time. He writes that he met Ditka and found himself tongue-tied. He even got teary. " `Well, Coach, I guess what I'm trying to say is just, well,' sniffle-sniffle-gurgle, `thanks so much for all the good times,' " he writes. Ditka, disinterested, shook his hand and said, "Thank you, Bob."

Afterward, his colleagues nearly fell over laughing. He told them, "If Coach Ditka wants to call me Bob, I'll change my name to Bob!"

Simon, who is actually known as "Scooter," is not sure he would turn around on the street if someone called out "Scott." As a boy, he took on the persona of White Sox left-handed pitcher Billy Pierce and refused to answer to his real name. He chose Pierce because Ernie Simon thought he was "stylish, nervy, and classy (words he also used to distinguish Adlai Stevenson, Jack Paar, and Edward R. Murrow)."

It's the sort of comment Simon might make to "Weekend Edition" sports commentator Ron Rappaport, an old friend. They get excited over their own teams, of course. Rappaport is in Chicago, Simon in Washington, D.C., where he calls himself a "Chicagoan Abroad."

Another old friend and "Weekend" contributor is the funny gardener, Ketzel Lavine, once the head of sports at NPR. Lavine and Simon talk about gardening. Although he knows nothing, Simon thinks he'd like to have a few pots of something on his narrow 66-foot Watergate balcony. She makes suggestions. He laughs. It is his most distinctive feature - unexpectedly silly - and when he laughs, listeners everywhere must be laughing, too.

Simon uses a New York accent to mimic his producer deciding that gardening had become big. The first time they had Lavine on the show, she was a big hit. "Ketzel was so funny - and so withering to me," says Simon. They're never in the same room. "We're not even on the same planet," he says.

Working in Washington

Simon lives in the Watergate complex, rather than an "adorable and terrific" townhouse across the street because he wants security and no fuss. "And occasionally, something interesting happens," he says. "I had the pleasure of coming home at night and shouting `Vermin, jackals, scum - colleagues!' during the whole Monica Lewinsky business. I'm the youngest person in the building now that she's gone."

Washington is sleeping on Saturdays, when Simon arises at 4 a.m. to get to NPR. Each week, the push to finish the show comes on Thursday and Friday. If something happens on a Friday night - like the O.J.-Bronco chase - the "Weekend" staff doesn't get to bed. The show works, says Simon, because they know one another well and are good friends.

One of the new members of NPR, a young producer named Charlie Mayer, does an extraordinary impersonation of him, says Simon. It's so well known around NPR that security guards stop Mayer in the hallway for the show. "He does the whole thing," says Simon. " `Well, God bless, God bless, forgive me, take care, God bless, forgive me, take care, if I may, God bless, take care. Haw haw haw.' "

Simon exaggerates the laugh a little. As if he needs to.