Dr. John Y. Simon Has Died

Friends,

Edit. If you are interested in this, please follow this link to Dr. Wheeler's farewell message about Dr. Simon.

Some of you Carbondale alums you read this may like to know that earlier today, Dr. John Y. Simon passed away.

He was a Carbondale institution, especially around the history department. He was a good friend and mentor to many people who went through the SIUC history department, including Emily and my friend Dr. Sam Wheeler who runs the Lincoln Studies site.

When it came to Ulysses S. Grant he was the guy in the country. He worked at editing what seemed to be the unending collection of the Ulysses S. Grant papers, as well as an extensive list academic accomplishments. He was a squirrelly old man, and one I only had a chance to meet a couple times, but I've heard plenty of fantastic anecdotes that made me want to talk to the guy more because he was more than an academic but a true character. And I'm going to share my favorite two.

Once, when on one of his smoke breaks outside the student union in Carbondale, he was approached by a female student. Simon, as you can tell from the picture below, would have never been considered in shape, so the female student started talking to him. She explained to him how he shouldn't smoke, how it was bad for him, and how he needs to quit. She then began to talk about Jesus. And how Jesus could help him quit smoking, and if Simon would just "give his soul to Jesus" then everything would be okay.

Simon contemplated this for a moment. He looked the young coed in the eyes and said with lungs full of smoke, "You're cute." He exhaled. "I'll give my soul to you." Then threw the cigarette down. The coed walked away, silently.

My second favorite story of his involved a discussion that happened between my friend Dr. Wheeler and him. They were discussing the places of breakfast in Carbondale, and Sam mentioned how he loved Mary Lou's because of the free order of biscuits and gravy you got when you ordered anything with eggs. Simon then went into a rant about how he hated biscuits and gravy. How that pasty, lumpy, disgusting food wasn't fit for anyone. He then trotted out a series of GRE words to describe how downright awful biscuits and gravys is. Simon earned his doctorate from Harvard iin 1961 after all, the man's a blue blood, and can have one of those George Plimpton kind of accents about the way he talked. So you can imagine the William F. Buckley style beating he put on the entire institution of biscuits and gravy.

Sam then asked, "Okay, Dr. Simon, what do you like?"

Without hesitation, he replied, "Bacon."

Dr. Simon will be missed. My thoughts and prayers are with his family.