My Father Wakes up Laughing: The Story of Edward and Janet Simons and Their Musical Legacy

By Jo Simons

In this biography of her parents, Jo Simons chronicles how the oldest orchestra conductor in the world, Ed Simons, and his wife, Janet, enriched the musical opportunities in Rockland County, New York from 1950 to the present. This humorous and joyful personal biography reveals how Ed and Janet revolutionized Rockland's music scene, and also

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643453453

Jo Simons

Jo Simons is a piano and Music Together teacher in Madison, WI and realized in 2009 that she needed to tell the story of her trailblazing musical parents, Janet and Ed Simons for being beautiful people, wonderful parents and also for the groundbreaking musical revolution they instigated in Rockland County, NY from the early 1950's to the present. My Father Wakes Up Laughing is Jo's first book. She is currently writing her memoir entitled Eat Poetry for Breakfast. Jo is also a poet who has had several of her poems published in Wisconsin poetry journals.

Book preview

Introduction

Janet and Ed Simons, parents I was blessed to have, were the musical dynamic duo of Rockland County, NY. Together, they enriched the musical landscape of the surrounding area during their nearly 60-year marriage until Mom died and Dad continued the mission on his own. Mom was the quiet mover and shaker; Dad supported her in whatever direction she wanted them to go. Dad has outlived my mother now for many years, and he is my main source of information about what happened in their past. In 1992 when Mom was 73, it became apparent that she was losing her mental abilities, and I asked her to write a memoir, which she did. She filled an entire notebook of facts from her life, and one can see the progression of her disease as, toward the end, she was copying music school recital programs.

I never even opened that memoir until I was writing this book and was thrilled to read what was there. Not only did she accurately portray a lot of information Dad didn’t recall, but she also corrected some of the things he told me that he admitted he wasn’t completely clear about. It was as if she was sitting in my house, telling me their life just when I needed her.

I visit Dad as often as I can, trekking from Madison, WI, to Pomona, NY, a dot on the map 40 minutes from New York City. Dad started telling me his stories while I typed. He claimed he felt a bit uncomfortable with the attention, but despite that statement, I know that he loves every opportunity to talk about himself and his rich life.

Although he is inching toward a century of life, (95 at this writing), his voice is vibrant and young. He does not look, sound, or act like a man of his age. He is not a complainer. He is delightful to be with, always seeing the humor and joy in whatever is going on. We share the same profession with variations, so there’s always a lot to talk about. He is delighted to hear about my musical life. He has a lot on his mind, preparing for the next concert or music appreciation class he’s been teaching since the ’70s or an upcoming performance, but he’s never too busy to talk to me. He has not slowed down professionally at all. The music and joy of life just keeps him going full tilt. A family friend Googled him recently and reported to us that he is the oldest active orchestra conductor in the country. He has been conducting the Rockland Symphony since 1952 and has no plans to leave.

Dad and I sit in the house my parents built in 1950, my favorite place to be, in the woods of our co-operative community, Skyview Acres in Pomona, NY. Our office is the kitchen table—a strangely-shaped piece of wood cut straight from a very wide tree by an artist/carpenter friend of the family. If one is not careful, things will fall to the floor if they get too close to the huge knot of that table/tree. Dad is next to the stone fireplace in his usual spot, dressed in what seems like an endless supply of my former husband’s hand-me-down clothes, which always makes me do a double take. His impressive eyebrows that have been left to grow wildly for decades flap gently as he talks. Dad’s life is full of fascinating, humorous, and charming stories. Listening to him, it seems that nothing bad has ever happened, because he always chooses to see the joyful side of life. This is the gift that makes him loved by so many and the treasure by whom I was blessed to be fathered.

I am completely charmed by my parents’ lives, their accomplishments, their spirit, their devotion to each other—the joy of a musical duet that never went sour. To me and their many students and fellow musicians who span the decades from the late ’40s to the present, they are musical heroes. All I ever really need to accomplish in life is to be their daughter. As they are loved, I am automatically sucked into their vortex of instant acceptance by whoever came in contact with them over time. My mother was active well into her 70s, but died at age 79 at the Steiner Fellowship (an organic farm/elder care center) after six years of dementia.

I was the lucky firstborn of this magical duet, and after me came my brother two years later. The power of the music in the house was irresistible, at least to me, and I also became a part of it. I teach piano and Music Together, a creative music class for kids ages birth to five. I also created a group piano method (Piano Puppies) for 3 and 4-year olds who have graduated from a preschool music program. Music is the current that courses through us from one generation to the next. There are four generations of musicians in the family. When asked what the religion of my household is, I always say, Music. My childhood was richly enhanced by the intense environment my parents created both professionally and personally. Their relationship of positive, supportive regard for one another, along with their progressive philosophies about child-rearing and our cooperative community living, was a magical formula from which I have reaped great rewards throughout my lifetime…I am thrilled to tell their story.

Prelude

Sometime in 2008, out of the deep recesses of my brain, My Father Wakes Up Laughing popped up, and I thought to myself, hmmm, that would be a good title for a book about the folks. But I wasn’t a writer and didn’t know at that time why it appeared, so I just filed it back into my unconscious mind. A couple of years later, a wonderful photo of Dad surfaced, taken by Juan Mobile, a poet and husband of a woman who had deep connections to Dad’s symphony, and I instantly knew it was the perfect shot for the cover of my still-not-wholly-conscious book. So now I had a book cover. Is this how books materialize ? I wondered. I have no idea. I’ve never written a book , I answered myself.

Somehow, this odd beginning created a pathway for me to realize that I did have a great story to tell of my trailblazer parents, to whom I am deeply indebted for the beautiful world they provided for my brother and me. But I was also aware that I was at a serious disadvantage: as a kid growing up in that house, I paid very little attention to what they were doing professionally. And frankly, I didn’t really care. My brother and I would sit in the bleachers of the orchestra hall and roll our eyes at the endless classical selections Dad’s symphony played. We had both moved on, to rock and roll in his case, jazz and pop in mine, and we felt that we had been classical-musicked to death in that house. But I completely relished the folks as people, as a couple, as the world’s best role models, and the lucky accident that they were also my parents. Despite the fact that they were so wrapped up in their musical worlds, I felt loved, not just by them, but also by the powerfully supportive community of Skyview Acres.

I took the obligatory piano and guitar lessons, played flute in the school band, was good at all of it, but when your parents are such powerful musicians, it’s not easy to follow in their footsteps. How do we own it? My brother figured out early that it was hopeless and literally flew away into aeronautics. I was the dutiful child who decided to do music by default, as it was something I did passably well, and I did want to maintain a musical connection with the folks. I have a degree in music and love the teaching that I do, but deep down, music is just an excuse to connect with people and make a halfway decent living as well. I think I’m a good teacher, but it’s because I know how to interact with kids in a way that makes them enjoy the learning process and me. Teaching piano and Music Together finally did allow me, at age 50, to feel I’d made it my own.

But I digress. I’m going to write a book. Really? The first thing I did was take a writing class that really helped me find my voice and gave me the confidence to begin this monumental task. On Christmas Day, 2009, plunked in front of Dad in our house in New York, the process of typing up his wonderful stories began; and my book was shakily underway. Soon enough, I wrote the introduction under that fabulous smiling face of him on the cover, but then was stymied; how do I start this thing? I thought about that for a long time before coming up with beginning just before I was born.

With help from a genealogy, cousins, and surviving uncles, I was able to accurately portray the family histories and stories that were heard over and over again and also became fodder for the first chapters. But when I came to Chapter 8 about their professional lives, I hit a wall. I had no idea how I was going to piece all that together. But then, miracle of miracles, I found boxes and boxes of newspaper articles, writings, concert programs, and more in Dad’s garage, mostly carefully labeled as if somebody someday might write a book. I was amazed at this find, because Ma was not a pack rat. The house that they built has no place for storage…no attic, no basement; plus, Ma ran a very bare-bones operation at home. There were no knickknacks anywhere, and she was always getting rid of things. She told me if you don’t wear something for a year, out it goes. So where did all this stuff come from? The music school, perhaps? I have no idea! I’m just very grateful that it exists!

The other marvelous thing that evolved through all the articles and more that I encountered was connecting with people who were in the know…who either played in the symphony, took lessons at the music school as kids, or whose compositions were premiered by Dad. Since the folks touched so many lives in such positive ways, many wonderful connections were made through the process of attempting to discover what they created professionally. I was also delighted to find a longtime symphony player who told me many juicy stories (many too off-color to include). That person is my invaluable Deep Throat (in this narrative referred to as Deep Bass), to whom I turn regularly for comic relief and information.

And my dear departed mother is always present, cheering me on, helping wherever she can, steering me to the right place to find things, always smiling at her brilliant foresight to be sure things were labeled and dated back in the day. And the most amazing thing that happened in the process was I became a writer—I actually think of myself as a choreographer. I came face to face with the immense amount of information, which I fondly refer to as Niagara Falls, and attempted to pull interesting droplets out of it to weave this story. Creating a music school and symphony can be dry stuff, but this story is full of humor, brilliant illustrations, lots of wonderful photos, and great stories. It is a joy to be tackling this project and to share it with Dad, who loves every minute of my process, even though he doesn’t remember a lot of it. But I got what I needed from him when he did remember, so it’s all good. Once more, thanks, Mom and Dad, for a beautiful life. You created a lovely story that I’m very excited to attempt to tell. Hope I can do it justice.

Simons Family, 1948 and 1988

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning

Late in the summer of 1944, just a few months before I was born, my viola and piano-playing mother, Janet Kelley, who tended to think in the grand sweeping style of an early explorer, announced to her violinist husband, Edward Simons, that they should move from Tuleta, Texas to the northeast. Mom’s desire to head out of town partially hinged on the Southern prejudice she encountered as a general music teacher in the Beeville elementary school system. She was dismayed to discover that the Mexican-American children, who had excellent musical ability, were prohibited from participating with the Anglo kids in any public performances. When she was asked to present a musical assembly to the PTA, the principal first removed the Mexicans so only the white kids could perform. Mom insisted on including the Mexican children, saying not only were they better musicians, but it was against her principles to exclude them. It caused such a stir that she was fired at the end of her first semester.

Dad enlisted in the Navy in 1942, while they were living in Pittsburgh. He was first sent to Memphis and then ended up in Corpus Christi, where they set up housekeeping together in Tuleta. He had heard from his childhood cellist friend, Alex Goldfield, that if he played in the Navy band, he would never see combat. After two years in Texas, he was going to be transferred to Virginia, but in the interim, Mom had her sights set on New York City, where she felt they would find good professional opportunities after he was discharged. Her rationale was that her talented husband should be in a big city like New York. He did not hesitate at Mom’s suggestion—a pattern that continued throughout their long marriage—and off they went in their 1938 Oldsmobile, adjusting the passenger seat to accommodate Mom’s swollen belly.

Janet Kelley and Edward Simons met in the summer of 1939 at Michigan State College (MSC—now MSU), where Mom and all her siblings enrolled after high school. Mom and her older sister, Hope, were music majors at MSC. At age 21, Dad had just completed his debut season in the first-violin section of the Pittsburgh Symphony—his dream job. Alex came home for the summer and invited Dad to come to East Lansing for a couple of weeks.

Whenever musicians were available, the lifelong activity of choice was playing string quartets, so naturally, Alex arranged a quartet, Dad and Alex, Mom and another woman friend on viola. Mom was a violinist until Dad convinced her to switch to viola after they were married. That made it much easier for them to find the other instruments necessary for playing string quartets. This is how my parents met for the first time. Mom was dating Alex then, so the initial relationship was fellow musicians and nothing more. At one of those quartet sessions, they found themselves in a room that was uncomfortably hot, so Dad suggested they play in the nude. Surprisingly, all complied. Unfortunately, someone happened to be walking by the room, heard the music, opened the door, and quickly closed it when he saw the naked players. He went straight to the Dean of Music and told him what he had witnessed.

Another incident occurred on this vacation that also became a black mark on Dad’s reputation. He and Alex were invited to play trios with a faculty member, but before the meeting, Dad bought a bottle of wine that they shared, and Alex got too drunk to tune his cello. The two of them went outside on the lawn, laughing and carousing so loudly that they caught the attention of a security guard, who took their names and reported them to the same Dean. The planned trios never happened with two of the three players too drunk to produce a sound. There is no evidence beyond this that Dad ever drank, except for an occasional glass of wine at dinner.

These incidents became important in the grand scheme of things in Dad’s involvement at MSC. When he got home after his trip, he got a call from Francis Aranyi, a teacher with whom he had briefly studied, now the head of the violin department at MSC. Aranyi said he was inviting several of his students to come to Pittsburgh for the summer to take lessons at Duquesne University and asked if Dad could help them find housing. Dad agreed, and Mom was one of those students. He arranged for her to stay at his house. Despite this, they still remained just musical colleagues.

When the summer was over, Aranyi asked Dad to come to MSC to be his assistant teacher. Dad was very reluctant to leave the symphony; however, a mild case of tendonitis helped him decide, and he once again returned to East Lansing. Dad’s role at Michigan State was to teach music education majors how to play and teach violin. Dad does not have a college degree, yet he has taught music in colleges for most of his life.

Dad reported, "There was a community orchestra in Lansing, and the manager and conductor found out about me and wanted me to become concertmaster, but they also asked me to appear as a soloist. I decided to play the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I also told Aranyi I wasn’t going to take lessons from him anymore and decided from then on that I was going to figure out how to play my instrument on my own. [He goes to get his violin to demonstrate]. I used to play with my left hand like this, using the top of my fingers near the fingernails, and decided to change that so the fleshy part of each finger was on the strings. I had a pain in my right arm and decided to think about how I was moving my arm.

I remembered a concert that Fritz Kreisler played, and he put his bow so it got crooked by the bridge, which means the arm is freely moving instead of being straight. I tried that, and it was a whole new world of bowing technique. Also in terms of shifting, I use my hand to do that, but don’t use the whole arm. I saw Kreisler do that when he came to Lansing to perform. Dad is continuously altering his bow arm and finger positions to improve his technique, and he sounds great as a result.

Mom graduated in 1939 at the age of 20 and was asked to take over the teaching assistant job of a graduate student who was leaving. She was pretty excited about it. However, the Midland school system applied to the college, looking for someone to initiate a strings program, and since she was the only string player graduating, she was forced to take that job instead. In her memoir, Ma said she wasn’t too happy about that, but in retrospect I think it laid the foundation for her to move musical mountains later on in her career. Mom’s memoir is fascinating and full of facts about her relationship with Dad, including details about their lifelong romance.

She writes, "When the summer was over, Alex and I hitchhiked back to Michigan. It was on that trip that he told me that he wanted to marry me. I was all excited about the idea, and we wound up at my parents’ house, where I announced it to them. Next was my arrival in Midland for my teaching job. I taught in four elementary schools (I had to drive an old Model A Ford to get to the schools). I taught vocal music in the junior high school and also had two beginner and intermediate bands. The initial part of the string program was two classes that met twice a week. I also became concertmistress of the local orchestra and played the Lalo violin concerto with them. The first day I had the junior high school chorus, we were preparing the kids to sing for an upcoming event. The way I handled the kids to be arranged so everyone could be seen, how they marched to their seats, and sang was very impressive to the principal. On the weekends, I would go visit Alex in E. Lansing.

"When Christmas vacation came, I told Alex I was coming to visit him, but he told me he wouldn’t be available. There was another woman, a friend of both of ours, whom I suspected he had become involved with. I told him I would be at a certain bus station, and if he wasn’t there, then I would assume it was over between us. He didn’t show up, so I just took a bus to Pittsburgh. Since Eddie had to go back to Lansing, we took the same bus to Detroit. We then hitchhiked to E. Lansing and managed to get a ride with someone who traveled 100 miles an hour on a two- lane highway. The way he wove in and out of traffic was pretty incredible.

"After the Christmas break, I resumed my job in Midland. My love affair with Alex was over. In the meantime, the orchestra I was playing in needed a conductor for one of the rehearsals, since the regular conductor was not able to be there, and I asked if they would like Eddie Simons to fill in; they said sure! So he came up to conduct that rehearsal.

"One night after we played quartets, Ed and I went out for a walk. In the middle of the walk he suggested that we dance, as he was thinking of a minuet we had just played. So we danced, and the next day I went back to my job. Then he wrote me a letter, which talked about a Beethoven song which had to do with something pertaining to love. I answered him, and by the time we met the next time, all of our feelings had been spelled out on paper, and we fell into each other’s arms.

During that summer, I decided that I did not want to go back to my teaching job in Midland, so I wrote them a letter saying I would stay until they found someone to replace me. They wrote back and told me not to come; they would find someone else. By this time, our love affair was fully developed. Eddie was asked to play a concerto with the college orchestra and had decided to leave Aranyi and work on it by himself. But then we realized that Ed was to be in the first draft for war duty. At this point I suggested we get married, since at that time they were not drafting married people.

Dad wasn’t sure they were a good match personality-wise until he began to realize that Mom was very practical in ways that he was not, and decided that her presence would help him navigate through life a lot more easily. Eventually, he accepted her proposal. When Mom first took him to meet her parents in Buchanan, Michigan, Dad was shocked to see they did not hug one another; they shook hands instead. He would have none of that and grabbed each of them, giving them strong hugs, much to their surprise. I asked Mom’s brother recently how his parents felt about Mom marrying a Jew. His response was, They had already been initiated by Alex Goldfield, so it wasn’t a shock.

Mom continues, We set the date for our wedding to be Dec. 6, 1940. Since Ed was playing the concerto the week before, his parents came and Ruthie [Dad’s sister and only sibling] stayed for the wedding, but his parents didn’t stay. The marriage happened at 11:30 p.m. Family and friends gathered in a colleague’s apartment, and a Unitarian minister administered the ceremony. There are no wedding photos. A trio played the music, and two of the three musicians were Mom and Dad. Following the ceremony, friends took turns reading from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The toast, which was made by the best man, was written on the marriage license, May the deep friendships of all the people gathered here for this event continue and other such friendships be made throughout the lives of the bride and groom.

More from Mom, "After the wedding, we stayed in a hotel and looked for an apartment that we found on a street in Lansing near the Capitol building. It was a two-room apartment with a bed that came out of the closet. During this time, the situation at the college was getting bad. The assistant teacher who took off for a couple of years came back, so she and Ed had to share the violin students. At the same time, Aranyi was misbehaving by trying to make his students rebel against some of their courses, so the school fired him and added, ‘Take your baggage with you.’ The ‘baggage,’ of course, was Ed [who already had a bad reputation for the two times he had been reported to the Dean].

We decided to go back to Pittsburgh, but before we went, I wanted to buy a better viola, so we hitchhiked to Chicago, where I looked up a place where they sold instruments. I had an old viola that was no good, and I traded it for a Postiglione that cost $200. [Postiglione learned the craft of instrument making from Stradivarius. I recently took the viola to an appraiser who thought it was a fake and sent me to another guy who confirmed his suspicion. According to them, It’s a nice viola worth about $8,000," but not the $150,000 we’d been led to believe all these years! Still, it was a good investment, considering it cost only $200 in 1941]. Then we hitchhiked to Pittsburgh. At the end of that summer we went with Thor Darling [their MSC science professor Communist friend] and a couple of other people who lived in Brooklyn to the World’s Fair.

"On our way back to Pittsburgh, we were picked up by some guy who had a horse in the back of his truck. He talked about having to stop to walk the horse, so we decided to get off at the next town and try our luck with other drivers. We must have passed each other 3 or 4 times because we kept getting short rides. The last ride pulled into some roadhouse. When we got in there, we once more saw the guy with the horse. That was the last stop. Fortunately, our driver was going to Pittsburgh, so we finally arrived at about 1:00 in the morning.

"That was a difficult summer. We spent some of it at my house in Michigan and some in Pittsburgh. When we were at my house, my mother suggested we go pick raspberries to earn a little money. That was no problem for me, because I did it as a kid. However, since it was a hot day, Eddie had to sit out part of the time. When we got back to Pittsburgh, I joined the musicians’ union, and we both tried out for the Pittsburgh Symphony. At first, Maestro Reiner said he couldn’t use me because of my bad rhythm. When I told him I had practiced a different Strauss piece because I knew he was going to play it and I tried very hard to play with good rhythm, he hired me. Then we started looking for an apartment. We found one close to the theater, and Eddie’s cousins, Ruth and Henry Garrick, moved in with us.

"That year with the symphony was a very interesting season. I was in the last chair. Once when Reiner asked us to play a passage, my partner fouled it up, and Reiner blamed me for it. I forget what he said, but he turned to Ed and made some remark. My partner apologized, and other members of the orchestra noticed that he was the one who screwed up and told me so. It was also during that year that we moved into a new housing development that was planned by the city. The other thing was on Dec 7th, the Japanese bombed U.S. troops. There was some kind of peace meeting going on in a building across the road from the theater we were playing in. At the same time, things going on in Europe with Hitler and Mussolini were very scary.

"When we were still living in the apartment near the theater, we used to have some wild parties where people got drunk. Ruth Garrick found a boyfriend, and Henry was already dating the girl he finally married. I remember I always fell asleep while all the other crazy stuff was going on, but Eddie stayed up and watched people get drunk and tried to sober them up. He also got very sick while we were there. He was taking medicine for some ailment he had. He developed a very high fever and couldn’t play in the symphony. I don’t remember how long it lasted, but it was pretty scary. But the other thing that was worrisome was his ulcer. That situation kept getting worse.

"When Alex told Eddie about the possibility of becoming a musician in the Navy to avoid combat, he decided to join. He was first sent to Norfolk, but eventually wound up in Memphis where they sent the Navy band. In the meantime, I was asked not to come back to the symphony—I could have tried out on violin, but I decided against that and went to Detroit to stay with my sister Hope. I got a job in a factory that was making airplane wings. I worked at night, I think 12-8, or something like that. It was pretty lonely there, so I stayed a few months and then went to be with Eddie in Memphis. I thought about trying to learn something about auto mechanics, but I decided against that and got a job with an accountant, typing tax forms.

"One of Ed’s friends in the Navy, Eddie Lavietes, left his wife in Memphis, and I moved in with her. She was pregnant and soon afterwards moved back to Brooklyn, where she had her baby while her husband was on some ship. In the meantime, Eddie was waiting for orders. They finally came, and he was sent to Texas. Shortly after he got there, I arranged to take a train to meet him. Since there were no seats, I sat on my bags, and in the morning we had a stop off in some town, where I decided to have breakfast. Whatever they gave me made me sick, and I started throwing up. When I finally got to Corpus Christi at the naval base, Eddie met me at the station and said he was given a leave of absence, so we decided to go back and pick up our car that we had left with my folks. In the meantime, we hitchhiked and mainly got rides with truck drivers. They knew I was sick, and every once in a