Scott Simon on the Ideal Metaphor for Life

Scott Simon, the witty Peabody Award-winning host of National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition,” is anchoring NPR’s coverage of the Democratic convention in Los Angeles this week.

That might be enough to fill a plate for most people, but not for Simon, who also has just published “Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan.”

The busy schedule of activities is not surprising for Simon, whose lengthy resume includes enough high points to satisfy the wildest dreams of journalistic success. Since he joined NPR in 1977, heading up its Chicago bureau, he has reported on presidential campaigns, traveled to every state in the U.S., covered seven wars and filed reports from Africa, India, the Middle East and the Caribbean.

His list of awards--in addition to the Peabody (which he received in 1989 for his radio essays)--includes the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of the Gulf War, a Presidential End Hunger Award for his reporting on the 1987-88 Ethiopian drought, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his 1986 coverage of racism in Philadelphia and a 1982 Emmy for the public television documentary “The Patterson Project.”

Yet, when Simon got around to taking a closer look at his own life with “Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan” (Hyperion), did he place it in the fast-track world of a globe-trotting journalist covering the meatiest of social and political topics?

No. He wrote about his life in the context of the subject that has been ever-present with him.

Sports. Specifically Chicago sports.

Question: So what is that all about: a memoir in the form of sports recollections?

Answer: I suppose I might have written a different book, one in which I placed the timeline of my own life against, oh, great theater or movies that I loved, or something like that. But actually, given my experience as a Chicagoan and the play of my own mind, sports did turn out to be pretty valid. And it didn’t hurt that I had such a good seat for the Chicago Bulls.

Q: Still, you didn’t pick theater or movies, and the book, in many ways, suggests that sports played a central role for you.

A: That’s absolutely true. I think sports, for a fan, has some of the cathartic and therapeutic properties of theater and entertainment. It permits us to inhabit another skin, another life for a few hours. It’s an experience that allows us to vent feelings and to, in a sense, go inside and outside of ourselves. And it may even be a little bit more valid for a Chicagoan.

Q: Why is that?

A: In part because the sense of identification that Chicagoans have with the Cubs, the Bears, the White Sox and, certainly, with the Bulls, at least for the years of Michael Jordan’s and that team’s preeminence. But I also found some of the links, however loony they may seem, to be irresistible.

Obviously, there’s no logical connection between those years in which the Bears were slow-footed, sluggish and blockheaded and the slow demise, the thickening of the arteries of the Chicago political machine. No logical connection, but it’s kind of irresistible to hold them in the mind at the same time. Thesame with the Bears’ Super Bowl victory and the rise of Harold Washington.

Q: Did you find some fundamental differences between writing the book and your on-air work?

A: Yes. When you interview someone on the air, open-ended questions are often not good, because they can take someone 10 minutes to answer them. But when you do a book, you don’t hesitate to ask an open-ended question because if someone talks for 10 minutes, at some point they’re probably going say something you want to home in on.

Q: Is there not the further factor that your presence in an on-air interview creates a dynamic that’s not necessarily present in writing a book?

A: Absolutely. When you do an interview for broadcast, you are very conscious of being a kind of surrogate for the audience.

Years ago we were interviewing the convicted mass murderer Henry Lee Lucas. The exact number of murders escapes me, but 67 was what he claimed at the time. And I was getting him, I’m afraid, to go back and remember each and every one of them, which he did with astonishing detail.

Now if I had been writing that for a book or a magazine piece or even, perhaps, a newspaper, I would have let him go through all 67. In broadcasting, as the audience’s surrogate, you feel the need, at some point, to say, “How could you do that?’ recognizing that if you ask that sort of question early in the interview, the subject might clam up. So it’s a judgment call you have to make.

Q: How do those judgment calls come into play when you’re doing something as overtly political as the convention coverage you’ve been doing for the last month?

A: You are inside an infomercial. So, on the one hand, you have to be fair to the people who are putting on the infomercial: Let them have the opportunity to address the American public. But you have to keep your wits about you and not just be their ventriloquist’s dummy. You have to keep your center of gravity, and the center of the story, in the center of the country and not just in the environment in which you’re in.

Q: Does keeping that center mean that, as an audience surrogate, you have to take a neutral stance, even in a political convention?

A: I’d rather say fair and balanced. I’m not sure that a neutral response properly reflects your experience as a reporter. To cite an example, I was not neutral about the war in Bosnia, nor should I have been. On the other hand, I hope I was fair and balanced to all viewpoints, even the fascist ones. And even in something like a political convention, how can one be neutral, for example, about Colin Powell’s speech to the Republicans? Or how can you be neutral about the public response to the 19-year-old girl with Down syndrome?

But you can be fair and balanced. As you should be whether you’re doing on air broadcasting or writing a personal memoir.

BE THERE

Scott Simon will be signing his book “Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan” at Sherman Oaks’ Fashion Square Mall’s Center Court, 14006 Riverside Drive, Sherman Oaks. 1 p.m. on Saturday. (818) 783-0550.