Memoir

Richard Keller Simon

Final version, March 2005

Summer 1946 with my parents Rhoda and Si

Tookany Park, near Philadelphia

That’s me over there in the picture, in the dark pants, standing next to Noah. It’s May 2003 and we’re on the Santa Barbara beach.

A few months later

WITH KATHY

Summer

2003

Photo by Bob Edmondson and taken in Bob and Susan Edmondson’s home in Walnut Creek California

I’ve thought about many things in the course of writing this memoir—how to make it interesting, of course, what to include, elaborate on, hint at obliquely, or leave out altogether. I hunted for images on the World Wide Web that made sense to include, and often was surprised at what I could locate. That has influenced the shape of this memoir because much of that material was important for many people besides myself. In the process, I figured out that a memoir like this had to find a balance between the ways I am typical of my generation and the ways I am unique.

I hope you find both aspects of this memoir interesting.

Here I am with Max Simon in September 2003. Max is a few weeks old, and the son of Paul Simon (my brother) and Bonney Lynch and he lives with them in Berkeley California.

Prelude

The average life expectancy for an American male is something like 77 or 78 years, so I figure at best I have contributed 18 years for you guys to divide up as best you can. Maybe one of you can live to 96 on my account, or two of you to 87, or if you want to, 18 of you can each have a year on me.

But regardless, I do wish that all of you will be able to die peacefully at the age of 95, quietly and painlessly in bed, surrounded by adoring family and friends. I’m sorry I missed this goal.

Many people I admired lived a lot shorter than that, even a lot shorter than me. For starters, among the people whose work I admired and used to teach: the novelist Jane Austen (age 41), the novelist Nathanael West (age 37), the painter Reginald Marsh (age 56), the actor Jules (John) Garfield (age 39), not to mention the usual suspects like Mozart. I also lived a lot longer than some of my friends and family—my brother Bill’s wife Cindy (age 43), my college friend Carl Cohen (age 28), my college friend Susan Gadiel (age 42 or so), my…well, you get the idea. This isn’t really a contest. But I take some consolation in not being alone here

Here is the grave of Jane Austen, and this is what is inscribed upon it.

In Memory of JANE AUSTEN, younger daughter of the late Rev. GEORGE AUSTEN, formerly rector of Steventon in this County. She departed this life on the 18th of July 1817, aged 41, after a long illness supported with the patience and hopes of a Christian. The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmth and love of her intimate connections.

Their grief is in proportion to their affection. They know their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction they are consoled by a firm thought humble hope that her charity, devotion, faith, and purity have rendered her soul acceptable in the sight of her REDEEMER.

Not bad huh? I used to read this out loud to my students in one of my Jane Austen lectures, and point out that none of us was likely to get such an inscription. The fact that she was a novelist is not mentioned on the grave at all, which is in Winchester Cathedral in case you’d like to take a look.

I want my ashes scattered so I am not in the market for such a memorial you understand. Yes, I admit it, with some vanity, I’d like to have had a Ben and Jerry Ice Cream flavor named after me, something in the manner of Cherry Garcia or Wavy Gravy. Kathy claims I can count Chubby Hubby, but that seems more generic of my sex and generation. I’d also liked to have been a question on Jeopardy, or had a star in some walk of fame somewhere. These are I know silly things and what counts is that you remember me in some capacity from time to time. It’s a lot more meaningful.

I wrote the following memoir following my diagnosis with mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. I’d like to be remembered for my life and not for my death, so I have only written about mesothelioma at the very end. Meanwhile I would like to thank everyone who has played an important part in my life, named or not named in the memoir that follows. I have always felt loved. Thank you.

This is the view outside our home at 815 Skyline Drive in San Luis Obispo. I walked Skyline once or twice a day in the spring of 2003, as I recovered from surgery. The neighbors often watched my progress. Sometimes I wanted to dress up as the Grim Reaper but Kathy said, Bad Idea.

Top of hill looking down

Me at top of Hill

I also presented the faculty awards in June for the College of Liberal Arts. I was pleased to be able to do this.

TEACHING October 13 2003

These photos of me teaching English 350 were taken by my old friend Richard Doctoroff

Doing My Gig In a Class in the Modern Novel

Asking a Question

Teaching January 2004: Large Lecture

Humanities 320

These photos of me teaching Humanities 320 taken by my old friend Patricia Bauer-Slate

In medias res

I know that you can judge a life by how it is lived, and not by how long it may last. I would have liked mine to have lasted a lot longer, but it seems appropriate here to write about who I was in the time I had. I am standing with Kathy and Noah in front of a real San Luis Obispo sunset. There is no fancy video manipulation involved here, just a gorgeous moment in our neighborhood. It was taken when Noah was a junior in high school.

We came to San Luis Obispo in 1988, when I was hired to teach at California Polytechnic State University (or Cal Poly). Noah was five and a half. Kathy set up a private practice as a clinical psychologist in town. We had a fine life here together. Kathy’s private practice flourished, I rose through the ranks at Cal Poly, became a full professor in my turn, and the chair of a small humanities program, and Noah went to school, played baseball, soccer, and basketball after school, all the usual small town kid stuff. When we struggled, it was with aspects of the small town mind-set. We had, for example, to make up a religion so Noah could stay in the Cub Scouts. (Don’t ask.) Noah solved some of this problem by taking his senior year of high school as an AFS exchange student in New Zealand.

On Pismo Beach shortly before we moved here and were just looking the place over. This became one of my favorite places in the area, especially during low tide south of the pier. I loved jogging on the beach. Photo from early 1988.

When I first started teaching in the late 1960s, I used to ask my students to write out their philosophy of life as a paper assignment. My goal was to design an assignment that my students would actually keep, after the class was over, and it actually was a very successful paper topic. When pushed, 18 and 19 year olds do a decent job on a topic like this. I would quote Socrates’ line to them when explaining what I wanted, that an unexamined life was not worth living.

So what’s to examine? From the perspective of a 60 year old, the assignment seems much harder and much easier at the same time.

I have tried to balance the demands of career and family as best I could, loved and been loved in turn by Kathy, worked with her to raise Noah as best we could. I have tried to challenge and inspire students, to write academic books and articles that were meaningful and important, and to make a contribution in the world. I have been sustained by my sense of humor, and by a healthy skepticism to almost everything in that larger world. I mean really, how can you take most of it seriously?

I’ll start with my career as an academic. I have almost always loved being a teacher. Some of the other stuff that has come along with it has been quite frustrating from time to time, given the nature of universities, but the actual teaching part has been quite rewarding. My goal has always been to have a meaningful impact on the ways my students have thought about themselves and about the world. It’s hard to know exactly how successful I have been but I have been gratified when students have thanked me, or recommended that their friends take classes from me. I certainly also have felt I had the respect of my peers, who awarded me the Cal Poly distinguished teaching award in 1995.

This photo of me in my University of Texas office was taken by my brother Paul while he was a student in the RTF program, and enrolled in a photography class. Date is probably the early 1980s.

My favorite moments in my life as a teacher have been standing in front of a large lecture class full of students and trying to hold the attention of as many of them as I could. Over the course of many years of trial and error, I pretty much figured out how to do this, by always connecting what I am teaching to something that the students already care about. This has led me to teaching movies and television programs, and to understanding the psychological interests of 18-25 year olds. No magic is involved.

During my teaching time at Cal Poly, the largest lecture hall on campus held 220 people, and was nicely configured in a semi-circle that rose sharply from the podium. I almost always felt empowered in that room, especially with the ability to project interesting visuals behind me on a large screen, and especially at moments when I was able to hold almost everyone’s attention. It was my favorite place on the Cal Poly campus.

I’ve taught in a number of very different colleges and universities over the course of my teaching career, and each has had a different kind of student. I started out in the late 1960s, at Northern Michigan University and Western Michigan University, then got a PhD at Stanford where I also taught as a teaching assistant, then went on to the University of California at San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, and California Poly in San Luis Obispo California. I also taught briefly at a community college in British Columbia. My major trauma in all of this was being denied tenure at Texas in 1985, which Kathy does remind me, I may have brought on myself by teaching pornography in classes on popular culture. She is sure that some parents much have complained to the dean.

What was I trying to prove? That I would act at Texas the same way I would act anywhere else. That universities are places where you examine the difficult materials, and that free inquiry is what an education is all about. Yes and as a result I was unemployed for two years in Austin, but (the silver lining) I got to be Noah’s primary parent and primary care giver from the time he was 3 to the time he was 5 and a half.

I loved to collect and wear hats. My goal was to have enough so that I could wear a different hat every teaching day. Classes at Cal Poly met 4 times a week for 10 weeks, so that meant 40 hats. I never got up quite that high, but I came close.

I’ve also loved writing about literature and I have increasingly loved my major research project into the ways in which popular culture has been critiqued and understood. I’m really sorry that I leave it incomplete.

What I have most loved as a scholar is that moment when I figured out something that no one else had figured out before me. When I wrote my first book, The Labyrinth of the Comic, for example, I was working through George Meredith’s 19^th century novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and noticed that his complex plot was an almost perfect copy of the complex plot of Henry Fielding’s 18^th century novel Tom Jones. I felt at that moment that I was in George Meredith’s mind, unlocking a puzzle that no one else had understood before, and it was truly gratifying.

Following the publication of my second book, Trash Culture, I was interviewed in 2000 by a number of radio stations, which was a lot of fun. Kathy and I drove to LA and San Diego and I was interviewed on call in talk show in both cities, and later, by phone, I did the same with a station in Illinois, but nothing came close to the hour I was interviewed by a national radio hook up in Australia, and I got to talk to all manner of Australians. That really was a high. My 15 minutes of fame included getting a review in the New York Times, but regrettably, the reviewer really hated my book.

CHINESE TRANSLATION

In 1995 I won Cal Poly’s distinguished teaching award, attended the graduation in cap and gown (borrowed), and was called to the podium by the University president. Cal Poly students throw tortillas during the graduation exercises so there was kind of a zany but festive mood in the football stadium. I didn’t quite know what to make of it.

I’ve had more than 15 minutes of fame: In 1978, following a series of public lectures I have at the University of Toronto, arranged by my old Stanford friend Mark Freiman, I was filmed by NBC News giving a lecture on advertising at UC San Diego, and then featured on a program called Weekend, which came on once a month in the Saturday Night Live time slot late on Saturday night. I was on for at least 15 minutes (after midnight of course) and did get some fan mail from around the country.

Then there was the crazy moment in 1970 when the national press wrote up the Santa Claus, Miss America, Superman film that I was making with a group of my undergrad students at Western Michigan University, and made me out to be a deranged drug dealer (all of this is described in greater detail in the part of this memoir devoted to my teaching experiences at Northern and Western Michigan Universities, 1968-1971.

Additional materials about my career as a teacher is on a separate document, Dick’s teaching.

MEETING AND MARRYING

KATHY WADDELL

The most significant single event in my adult life was meeting and marrying Kathy Waddell. She came to a lecture I was giving at Stanford in early 1973 on themes in rock ‘n’ roll, and asked if I would speak to the prisoners of war she was working with in a ward of the local Veterans Administration hospital. They had just returned from captivity in Vietnam. I said no. The POWS were pilots who had bombed women and children, but…to Kathy’s credit she didn’t give up on me, asked to borrow books I had used for my lecture, and pretty soon we were dating. By the time I had melted, and decided not to be such a hard ass, Kathy had been moved to a different project in the VA and was no longer dealing with the POWS. So much for the romantic start.

This was the photo we used for our wedding invitation in August of 1974.

And a really great life with Kathy followed from that moment for which I have always been very grateful. Thank you Babe.

Crystal Lake Michigan 1977, with our schnauzer Muff

Philadelphia 1987 about to go to a high school reunion

In Jasper Indiana 1987 about to go to Kathy’s 25^th high school reunion. We won the prize for being the best dancers. Kathy’s mom Rosie is in the distance.

BIRTH OF NOAH

The second most important single event in my adult life was the birth of our son Noah on November 20, 1982, in Austin Texas. I stood in the delivery room, sometimes quite scared because Kathy was screaming louder than I had ever heard her scream. She got through it pretty well, but not unscathed. Our friend Mitzi was the nurse in the delivery room and the doctor handed Noah to Mitzi who must have cleaned him up a bit and wrapped him, and than handed him to me. Jeez. I wasn’t prepared for the moment because Noah, aged 2 minutes, looked calmly at me with a look of intense concentration, like a little adult.

I knew we were in for an interesting time of it and I remember telling Kathy a short time later that our son was going to be curious, intense, and stubborn. All these predictions came true, but that’s a much longer story. After Noah’s birth I remember going to teach a class at the University of Texas and telling my students I had just become a father. I got a standing ovation, which, naturally, I loved.

And so I became a father, and there were constant surprises starting back then in 1982. Noah was a sweet and charming little tyke as the photos will naturally show, but also demanding. Just figuring out how to be a father was something that proved to be difficult in itself.

I’m skipping a lot here, but I do want to write about being a father. My own dad, once I got out of high school and he started to treat me like an adult, was a source of constant strength and support to me—from the time I was 18 to the time he lost it in the haze of the dementia caused by Parkinson’s. But by then I was past 50, so I really had the benefit of a good father for a long time.

I’m really sorry I won’t be able to be supportive in that way to Noah through his adult life. When things were bad my dad was comforting, and when things were good my dad was celebratory. I could write out some comforting and some celebratory things here for Noah to read, depending on the circumstances, but it seems kind of artificial. I love you Noah.

I’m really sorry I won’t be around to help out, to pat you on the back, to loan you the money to help buy your first house, to congratulate you on getting married or having children, or a success in your career, whatever. Hug from the past.

Noah drew this for Late Father’s Day 1995. “My Father chooses to read a book even if other things are going on around him June 1995.

But maybe it’s time to start at the beginning…

Starting Out in the 1940s

I was born on November 19 1944, during the last year of World War II, and lived with my mother and father, and later my brother Bill (born 1947) in the Northcliffe Apartments on north Broad Street above Stenton Ave in Philadelphia. It was a 3 story sandy brick building and we lived on the front end of the top floor, overlooking Broad Street. (The building no longer stands.) We moved out in 1950.

My parents, Rhoda and Si, pose here on the long narrow balcony outside our apartment shortly before I was born. I look at least 6 months old in the other picture, which was taken on the grounds of the Jewish Hospital at Broad and Olney—the nearest park-like area to our apartment.