Scott Simon

Early life

Simon was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of comedian Ernie Simon and actress Patricia Lyons. He also had a sister who died at a young age. He grew up in major cities across the United States and Canada, including Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.

Simon's father was Jewish and his mother was Irish Catholic. His father died when Scott was 16, and his mother later married former minor league baseball player Ralph G. Newman, an American Civil War scholar and author who ran the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago.

Career

Simon has been with NPR for over three decades, beginning in 1977 as Chicago bureau chief, and his career encompasses other types of media as well.

His books include Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan (2000); Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball (2002); Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption (2010), about his experiences adopting two daughters; and the novels Pretty Birds (2005) and Windy City: A Novel of Politics (2008).

He has also hosted many television series and specials, including PBS's Need to Know in 2011–13. He guest-hosted BBC World News America, filling in for Matt Frei, and anchored NBC's Weekend Today in 1992–93.

Controversies

After September 11, 2001, Simon spoke and wrote in support of the "war on terror", publishing an op-ed in the October 11, 2001, Wall Street Journal titled "Even Pacifists Must Support This War." He questioned nonviolence at greater length in the Quaker publication Friends Journal in December 2001, provoking many angry letters, to which he replied in the May 2003 issue.

On November 15, 2014, at the beginning of an interview for Weekend Edition Saturday, Bill Cosby and his wife Camille declined to respond to the accusations of sexual assault against Cosby when Simon gave them the opportunity. As narrated by Simon in the interview, Cosby only shook his head no. The rest of the interview focused on the couple's loan of their 62-piece African art collection for an exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Awards

Simon has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody and the Emmy, and has received numerous honorary degrees. In May 2010, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Willamette University, where he was that year's commencement speaker. He was named a Lincoln Laureate in 2016 in the area of Business, Industry & Communications.

Family

Simon met French documentary filmmaker Caroline Richard during an NPR interview in 2000. They married on September 10, 2000, in a mixed-faith (Methodist, Quaker, and Jewish) service in Ridgefield, Connecticut, at the home of fashion designer Alexander Julian. They have two daughters, both adopted as babies from China: Elise, in 2004, and Lina, in 2007. They consider themselves a Jewish family (Simon's father was Jewish and his mother was Irish Catholic).

In 2006 Simon and his wife were contacted by police as part of the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning investigation. The family was staying at a hotel near the restaurant at the center of the poisoning incident, and had twice bought food there for their daughter Elise. The health of the family was not affected.

In July 2013, in a groundbreaking use of social media, Simon began tweeting his emotions and conversations with his mother during her last days of life, which she spent in a hospital intensive-care unit. "I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way", read one tweet. In March 2015, he published a memoir about her titled Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime.