HOME AND AWAY: Memoir of a Fan
By Scott Simon
Hyperion, 364 pages, $23.95
Reading Scott Simon’s fine and engagingly personal new book–indeed, rereading certain portions of it for the nostalgic joys they provide–I was struck by a surprising and odd notion: What a charmed life I have led, for the personalities and events that pepper this book and helped shape Simon’s life are some of the same ones that have marked the path of mine, and undoubtedly others who came of age in the Chicago where giants such as Ernie Banks, Bill Veeck, Jack Brickhouse, George Halas, Richard J. Daley and Gale Sayers walked.
This is a distinctly and distinctive Chicago story, and the vanished heroes of a shared place and time vividly trot across the book’s pages. Most of them are sports figures.
“I am a fan,” Simon writes. “Fans don’t get much respect. In literature and pop culture, advertising and conversation, we are often seen as the anonymously clamorous: bug-eyed and beer-swollen, inert perennials who come to life only as we cheer and jeer the exertions of those who are stronger, fitter, more graceful, and bold.”
Simon the fan will get a great deal of respect from his readers. He is an erudite and clever writer, a sharp-eyed observer. He is also passionate:
“Most of these recollections trace my life as a fan through Chicago’s major sports teams, baseball, football, and basketball, the Cubs, Bears, and Bulls. It is also a partial catalog of loves: friends, family (lineal and spiritual), the confluence of faith, theater, and politics; and, finally, overall, Chicago.”
He was connected to the city in special ways. His father, Ernie Simon, an alcoholic who would die when Scott was a teen, had been a broadcast partner to Brickhouse, who was Scott’s godfather. His mother, Patricia Lyons, was close with Cubs manager Charlie Grimm’s wife. His stepfather was Ralph Newman, a scholar (and former minor-league-baseball player) whose Abraham Lincoln Bookstore was nationally known. Chicago was Scott Simon’s cozy playground, and his memories are warm.
“Then, I’d take the steps on a concrete staircase two at a time up to the entrance of the Chicago Public Library,” he writes. “There was a reading room on the third floor, overlooking Michigan Avenue, where you could fill out slips to receive softball-sized spools of microfilm that you could thread on a machine with a screen that would show you the pages of old newspapers.”
Tell me about it. I cannot walk into that building, now the Cultural Center, without being struck by similar microfilm memories.
And tell me again, Mr. Simon, how you used to insist that your parents call you “Billy,” after Sox pitcher Billy Pierce, at the same time I was demanding to be called “Luis,” after Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio.
This is not to say that Simon and I are pals. I played golf many times with Brickhouse. I was in love with Simon’s stepfather’s store. Our parents had dozens of friends in common. But I have met Simon only twice, first when he was a young reporter for an ill-fated but bold 1970s TV news program on WTTW-Ch. 11, on which my late father, Herman Kogan, served as commentator, and later at some cocktail party, when he was a globe-trotting radio correspondent and still a few years away from becoming the host of National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition.”
His career provides an interesting thread through the larger fabric of the book, showing us a meeting with Fidel Castro, taking us to Kosovo and to “the middle of the night during the middle months of covering the Gulf War, (when) I often twitched sleeplessly in the sleeping bag on the bunker floor on which I was assigned to bed down.”
In some tense Persian Gulf War moments (“the violet, violent darkness of a desert night”), he would think about baseball or the Bulls, and that gave him “a wave to ride back down into sleep.”
Mostly, it was the Bulls. Like many writers before him–from newspaper columnists to David Halberstam, a Simon friend who is lavishly thanked in the book’s acknowledgments–Simon goes a bit gaga over the Michael Jordan gang. Allowed close access through a cultivated but genuine friendship with former Bulls center Luc Longley, he falls under the Michael miasma and devotes huge chunks of the book to the Bulls. We get all the familiar details: “(A)t Wilmington’s Laney High School, Michael is cut from his high school basketball team–and cries. As his tears dry, mortification hardens into motivation.”
With too many of the book’s chapters Bulls-stuffed, the details of games and disputes often overshadow the tender and tragic story of Newman’s dying and Simon’s reaction to it. “The intimacy and urgency of his needs dismayed him,” Simon writes. “Now, he needed help just to attend himself in the bathroom. . . . (A) look of absolute embarrassment would tint and twist his face. It was so unlike any other countenance I had seen in Ralph, it made him almost unrecognizable.”
Though ample reporting and fact-checking give the book a solid footing, Simon trusts his memory for some facts and gets them wrong. For example, there were more than six rows of bleacher seats in Wrigley Field. But one can easily forgive the book’s few minor mistakes and occasional touches of pomposity. With a book this ambitious, evocative and frequently moving, readers will be too busy reliving pleasant memories, thinking of games won and lost, of the legacy of fathers, and of the bonds between fathers and sons.
And dreaming, perhaps–with wonderful absurdity–of a World Series that would feature the Cubs.
