#bob simon

‘I’m Bob Simon’, you announced to the world every week on the cover of 60 Minutes.  You always had a loud, clear voice that made you seem twenty or thirty years younger.  I heard your voice and saw your picture every week but didn’t know who you were, what you’d done.  I watched your stories but didn’t realize that your amazing writing skills helped transport me into worlds thousands of miles from home.  Your stories became some of my favorites, the Lost Boys of Sudan, the trains that transported Jewish children away from genocide.  I’d watch them five times over, inspired by the hope they shined on the world, smiling at the beautiful endings that seemed impossible. Then came the night I saw the announcement on Facebook and my mother recognized you with surprise, the night a teary-eyed Scott Pelley broke the news on air, the night I searched you on Wikipedia for the first time.  There was the day that you became the cover story on the Evening News, the day On The Road was a reflection about your inspiration on other journalists, the day you got a special on 60 Minutes that I watched even though I had an essay to revise.  There was the bitter irony that you had braved so many war zones, even forty days of Iraqi prison for your work, yet you were taken from us by a crash, killed by an incompetent driver, and the irony that you had written about the possibility of dying in a car crash in your book, Forty Days.  Tributes poured in on Facebook and on CBS News as people remembered your work, your writing, your sense of humor, your way with kids who visited the newsroom, your inspiration in their own work. I read your past reports, finding new favorites: polar bears, elephant orphanage, radio telescope high in the mountains.  I remembered you when I listened to ‘Seasons in the Sun’ because it was a time when spring was in the air.  I managed to find a copy of Forty Days in the library and looked forward to reading it every day.  It is an enthralling and often tragic story, but there are some uplifting parts and an abundance of good writing---one of my all-time favorite quotes is from your book (“Smoke from the kerosene stove hovered near the ceiling, providing what looked like a white and protective cloud.  But there was something else permeating the air of our cell that morning.  That dark morning, the only word I could find to describe it was love.”).  And I love how you didn’t turn against the Iraqis, only against the perpetrators, despite going through such a horrible experience, and managed to keep your sense of humor (I found a good handful of funny quotes in the book too).  I tried to remember your writing style in the hope that I could learn from it in my own writing---your way of describing seemingly ordinary settings, your style that takes the reader or viewer to the place itself.  You are an inspiration to everyone who hopes to be a good writer, a great storyteller. If there are other worlds, other universes, other dimensions, I hope you will be in a world where the stories you report are bathed in gold and shimmering with starlight, a world where every story blossoms with hope and vivid color.   In this world, Bob Simon, you will not be forgotten.

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