Monday night was certainly a big night for Ohio State and Bruce Springsteen fans alike. The Boss put on a spectacular performance at the Schottenstein Center and the basketball Buckeyes landed a solid win against California at St. John Arena in the National Invitation Tournament. All-too-many might have missed OSU Hillel Foundation welcoming Emmy and Peabody Award-winning National Public Radio broadcaster Scott Simon, host of Saturday's "Weekend Edition."
Though it was made clear that the reason for his visit was to plug his new book "Windy City," the broadcast journalist's second effort at fiction, the 56-year-old Simon touched on a wide - and often sporadic - array of topics and issues, ranging from his experiences covering conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans to the commercialization of modern news media and the raising of his two young daughters, whom he and his wife adopted from China.
The obvious diversity of Simon's immediate family coupled with his own rare blend of ethnic makeup - his mother was Catholic and his father was a Jewish man who would later practice Quaker doctrine - would serve as a constant backdrop for his journeys and the stories that would emerge from them. These recollections of his travels to war-torn countries, although visibly tense and often horrifying, were tinged with a keen sense of humor, which Simon relied upon frequently while describing his time in the turbulent Middle East.
In one particular, Simon spoke of his visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where he began chatting with several Palestinian youths who ended up kidnapping him and locking him in a room for more than 24 hours after fearing the compiled audio testimony Simon had gathered from them would be handed over to the Israelis. After his release (and the audio's erasing), the young men insisted on taking him to breakfast. "There I was," he said, "walking into a coffee shop with my kidnappers. Needless to say, I didn't jump for the buffet."
As can be expected, Simon's war coverage often landed him in places where his Judaism was a particular safety concern and source for contempt among natives, particularly during his visit to Afghanistan during which time the murder and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (who was also Jewish) shocked and horrified the world.
While visiting the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha statues, which were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, Simon said he and his producer were confronted by men who invited them to stay the night in what would be later described to them as they entered as a "Hezbollah guesthouse" belonging to a local warlord. "My producer whispered in my ear: 'If they find out we're Jewish, that's the end of it,'" he said.
It is no secret Simon's endeavors have frequently put him in harm's way; however, it was not until he spoke of his daughters and the subject of their race that the radio host found himself choked up. After the couple's second child was literally hand-delivered to their hotel room in China, Simon and his wife, Caroline, questioned whether the infant they were given was the same as the child from the photograph they had received prior to their visit. It was at that point, Simon recalled, the then-4-year-old Elise chimed in that it "doesn't matter."
"It took a moment like that for me to realize," said Simon, struggling to hold back tears, "that when it comes to race, nothing matters," adding it is "just the way small minds keep score."
Simon joined NPR in 1977. Since that time, he has won countless awards in journalism and broadcasting and has written several books - fiction and non - in which he has indulged in topics ranging from racial integration in baseball to teenage female snipers in Bosnia to his most recent work, a comedy about politics in Chicago. He currently resides in Chicago with his wife and two daughters and can be heard Saturdays on NPR's "Weekend Edition."
Ben Zenitsky can be reached at zenitsky.1@osu.edu.
2008 Woodie Awards
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