had until then constituted nearly the entire panoply of adults in my life.
Somewhere in the second half of my freshman year, he and six others—a couple were attractive younger faculty wives, I was interested to note—staged the first ever nuclear disarmament demonstration in the history of the Ivy League in the middle of the Dartmouth Green. This was in the winter of 1960-1961, not long after the far more dramatic demonstrations in Berkeley, California, against the House Un-American Activities Committee (commemorated in the film Operation Abolition), which many consider the beginning of our modern era of protest. But I was more transfixed by the local New Hampshire event and yearned to participate.
Even then I realized on some instinctive level the important bond between progressive politics and artistic success, though I had no idea how intricate it was. But besides wanting to show my colors as an incipient progressive, the subject of the tiny Dartmouth demonstration had a rather large personal component for me. Nuclear weapons provided an eerie background to the childhood of most of my generation. And for me they were more than that. They were the major point of contention between my father and me, the focus of my adolescent rebellion.
My father, Norman Simon, was a radiologist—among the first in private practice in the City of New York—who volunteered his time for the Atomic Energy Commission. Although it was probably something of an exaggeration, I was told as a boy that my father would be de facto Governor of New York in the event of a nuclear attack. He had treated the “Hiroshima Ladies”—the group of victims of the Hiroshima blast who were flown to the U.S. for examination—and was supposed to know as well as anybody how to deal with the effects of radioactive fallout on the human body. When I was very young, he would spend many of his weekends at the Atomic Energy Commission installation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or at Los Alamos itself. (I have a dim recollection of being introduced to the Manhattan Project scientists Lisa Meitner and J. Robert Oppenheimer as a child. I must have been about three.) He would return from those weekends with a grim expression, having attended lectures on the latest doomsday weapons—by then they must have been thermonuclear—that only those with the highest security clearance were allowed to see.
My father’s obtaining that elevated clearance provided the background for one of my more potent childhood memories. I recall at the age of seven standing in the lobby of our apartment, two blocks from New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, where my father practiced, watching a pair of FBI agents conduct an interview about my dad. The agents were scary enough to me in their gangster-movie wide-brimmed fedoras, but not nearly as disturbing as the man they were questioning. He was the superintendent of our building, an angry drunk who beat his kid with an old-fashioned cat ’o nine tails. I knew this because his son Byron was my after-school playmate; I had seen the super whip him on more than one occasion in the shadows of the dank corridor near their basement apartment. I had also seen the welts on Byron’s back and arms. The idea that a drunken thug like that super held my father’s future in his hands was unnerving to my seven-year-old self. Nothing good could come of that. And my fears were only exacerbated by my pal and confidante Nick, our handsome young elevator man from the Bronx. He informed me that the feds had been asking if my dad was a commie. I knew for sure that he wasn’t, but I wasn’t certain what the elevator man thought, or anybody else for that matter. Those were paranoid times, even for a seven year old. And I couldn’t ask anyone the truth at home. The atmosphere between my parents, never particularly relaxed, was extremely testy until that investigation was finally over and I somehow learned my father had the coveted “Q” clearance, whatever that meant.
So the old “duck and cover” game we used to play at PS 6 back in the early Fifties, hiding from atomic bombs with our heads in our hands while contorted under those cramped nineteenth-century folding school desks—that was a family matter to me. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Feig, whose husband was also a doctor, knew this. She’d announce to my classmates that “Roger’s father” would come in to check up on them if they didn’t behave in the proper manner during their proxy nuclear holocaust exercises.
I was proud of this parental recognition then, but by the time I was in junior high, adolescent hormones were kicking in and I was starting to separate from my father. I didn’t like that he worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and especially disliked that he often represented the AEC in debates with the newly formed Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Never mind that my father told me not only that he actually sympathized with SANE but also that by the end of their debates everyone was really listening to him, because, after all, he knew the facts and they knew only their idealistic pronouncements. I wasn’t buying. More than that—I was embarrassed. My father was on the wrong side.
Not long into high school, I was attending my first meetings—found in ads on the back of The Village Voice—of a short-lived group called the Student Peace Union. They advertised that they were a “Third Camp” in opposition to the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union. I didn’t realize then that the “Third Camp” consisted mostly of Trotskyists trying to find a way to rope in a few naive Quakers and other pacifists and put them on the straight and narrow to world socialism. In fact, at that point, I had no idea how to recognize any of the socialist sects or their methodologies or internecine rivalries. I wasn’t even fifteen.
I came in from Scarsdale for the SPU lectures at the Judson Church with a high school friend whose parents were Quakers and members of the American Friends Service Committee. In reality my friend and I weren’t very interested in the lectures. We wanted to meet the Village beatnik girls of our dreams. That meant we would skip out of the political speechifying after about ten minutes and head over to Rick’s Café Bizarre or Rienzi’s Coffee Shop on Bleecker in the hope of running into one, or preferably two, of those mysterious creatures in leotards. Of course, when we did, we suburban kids couldn’t have been of less interest to them. So my friend and I ended up spending most of our time drinking hot cider (why was that hip?) and playing chess. Later, too young to go inside, we would “free beat” in front of Birdland, listening to Coltrane or Cannonball Adderley before taking the last train back to Westchester. A couple of times we even puffed on a joint late at night at the Scarsdale station. It seemed the safest place for such reckless abandon.
In true teenage fashion I resisted sharing these experiences with my parents, especially the furtive pot smoking. This was still the Fifties, remember. But I suspect that my mother romanticized my adventures anyway, thinking they were more than they were. (That would have been easy at that point.) She’d had literary dreams and I got some of my aspirations from her. Like seemingly half of my family, my mother had wanted to be a writer.
Ruth Simon—daughter of the Polish-born Ben Lichtenberg and the Bronx-born Minerva Kahn—dropped out of college in her junior year to take an assistant’s job with the Paris branch of the Chicago Tribune. There she hung around Left Bank cafes and met journalistic lights like Walter Lippman. It was a time in her life she told me about repeatedly when I was a boy—her trips to Spain after the Civil War and to Germany with the Nazis already in control. But as the Second World War loomed, she returned to America and, bourgeois impulses at work, agreed to marry my father after only a couple of dates. It helped that he was smart and good-looking (both my parents were attractive), but all the same he came from a seemingly lower-class Jewish family of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants from the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts and had to pass muster with my mother’s more “aristocratic” father. Ben Lichtenberg was a foppish public relations man who admired Napoleon, dined frequently at the Pavillion, allegedly changed his Sulka’s silk shirts five times a day and claimed to be related to the Baron von Lichtenberg—supposedly, or so my grandmother told me, one of the rare Jewish royals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Google has nothing on this.)
After marrying, to keep her hopes of an independent career alive, my mother spent another couple of years as a publicist for classical musicians, during which time she walked around Manhattan wearing a hat fashioned from a long-playing record of Metropolitan Opera star Lili Pons. But after that, she never worked again. Later, I would live out those Paris literary dreams for her, but then,
