Prologue
My journey to become a comedian led me to a career helping historically underserved students as a Los Angeles public school teacher, guidance counselor, administrator and attendance counselor/truant officer. The latter position unofficially makes me a Hooky Bookie. "The Hooky Bookie Comic" traces the origins and pursuit of my dream to bring laughter to the world. I now look back at my life of public service and my diversion into an elusive career as a laughs specialist.
Growing up unaware of my family history did not seem out of the ordinary at the time. Later in my life I would discover that the Simmons family had lived, farmed and operated businesses in the rural community of Cherokee, Iowa, since the earliest days of recorded history. William McLean Simmons also known as William "The Hunter" Simmons was born on July 6, 1813, in Albany, New York. He married Laura Westcott from Aurora, New York, in 1834. William was a famous guide, hunter, and natural born trapper. His prowess and skill sustained his family and it has been said that he shipped more game from Will County, Illinois, than any man before or since. The rifle he used in battle and for hunting wild game is in a collection at the Sanford Museum in Cherokee today.
William's son, Henry Harrison Simmons, was born in Buffalo, New York on September 25, 1836. Henry married Eunice Jane Chapman in Naperville, Illinois, in 1856. During the Civil War, Henry served as a Union Army Private, in Company K, 88th Regiment, Illinois, and was discharged at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1865.
Years later, Henry purchased the Simmons family farm on November 9, 1872 as part of a land grant from the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company. The parcel of 160 acres was purchased for one thousand eight dollars. It would be farmed for generations by the Simmons family. In 1972, the property was designated a "Centennial Farm" for having remained in the Simmons family for over one hundred years.
Toiling in the rich Iowan soil did not come without hardships. In 1880, Henry had to have his left arm amputated after he was injured by a tumbling rod on a thrashing machine. In later years, his grandchildren would describe how the stub of his arm would swirl whenever he was laughing or excited.
The Simmons family and the farm survived pandemics, depression and two World Wars, but eventually it could not profit as a small scale enterprise. It was sold to a larger conglomerate farming family headed by retired Green Bay Packers and St. Louis Rams football player, Adam Timmerman. The original family home, the barn and the storage facilities were demolished and it is now part of a much larger corn field.
With the help of the internet and DNA testing my first cousin would later discover that the Iowa Simmons family was a descendant of Moses Simonson. Simonson was also known as Moyses Simonson or Symonson or Moses Simmons. Simonson (1605-1690) was born in Holland and was one of the earliest settlers of New England. In 1621, Simonson arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, aboard the ship Fortune. He was an unmarried man and he would have been present at the time of the Pilgrims First Thanksgiving in 1621. Sources have presumed that Simonson was at least partially Jewish based on his name and his Dutch origin. By the 1633 tax list, Simonson had shortened his name to Simmons and settled in Duxbury, Massachusetts. In 1639 he married and had at least seven children.
A direct descendant of Simonson founded Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1899. Simmons University graduated its first African American student in 1914. Furthermore, Simmons University was one of the few private colleges not to impose admission quotas on Jewish students for the first half of the 1900s.
This recent discovery of my Jewish heritage dating back nearly 400 years ago came too late for my comedy career. It does however explain why I felt so comfortable using Yiddish words like oy vey, putz, plotz, schlep, schmuck, and klutz. It also helps to explain a phrase that I enjoyed and repeated many times:
"There are only two types of people in the world. Those who are Jewish and those who want to be."
Trying to catch up on a 400-year gap of my knowledge of the Jewish faith would require a lot of fun and interesting research.
The reliability of the current DNA tests has always seemed somewhat dubious. Almost everyone who takes one of these birthright tests ends up being related to someone historically rich and famous.
I provided a DNA sample and answered a questionnaire from the same heritage company that my cousin used. I paid the minimum fee of $29.99 and stated that among other things, I liked French fries, French toast and champagne. The laboratory results came back complete with graphs, charts and data to support their theory that I was a direct descendant of King Charlemagne (b 747-814).
For an additional fee, along with my social security number and credit card pass codes, it could be determined if I was a direct descendant of one of King Charlemagne's four wives or just one of his illegitimate children from one of his many concubines. Oy vey, such a deal!
It is ironic and surprising that as a youth, I literally did not know my nationality. Nationality was rarely mentioned while living in Cherokee, Iowa, but it was a topic of frequent discussions by contemporaries upon my arrival to California in the Spring of 1964.
Growing up, any serious discussion about my nationality and family roots focused on my mother, Elinor Simmons. Leading up to the March 17th celebration of St. Patrick's Day, my brother and I were informed that we were Irish. I didn't take it too seriously because on St. Patrick's Day, it is often said that everyone is Irish. I had always assumed that every family ate Lucky Charms cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
My mother, Gertrude Elinor Ware was born on December 19, 1919, the youngest of three children of George E. and Cecilia K.B. Ware. Elinor, along with her older siblings, Odessa and Lawrence, grew up poor and suffered greatly with the impact on daily life of the 1929 stock market crash. Life got more complicated when my grandparents divorced leaving the family to survive without the support of their father. As a result of his abandonment of the family, my mother held a life-long resentment of her father. She did not like to talk about her life during the depression (1929-1933). It was a topic that she only seemed to respond to in a manner that was short and curt. It was clearly evident that memories of her difficult childhood haunted her for the rest of her life. Her reconciliation with her father in the 1950s and early 1960s was short-lived.
My grandmother, Cecilia Ware, died a pauper. To complicate matters, she suffered from the early on-set of dementia. Grandmother Ware was a loving, caring and deeply religious woman who lived a life of struggle and hardship.
Elinor's older brother, my Uncle Lawrence, was the glue that held the family together in those desperate years. He helped provide for the Ware family as a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). My mom loved her brother and revered him as a saint.
Arriving from the sheltered small town of Cherokee, Iowa, I wasn't prepared for the cultural experience that was 1960's California. It seemed that all of the students in me and my brother's classes were talking about their heritage.
The California kids said things like, "I'm Mexican," or "I'm Italian."
They questioned us asking, "What nationality are you?"
This type of question often rekindled my curiosity about the past. Was there specific information about my heritage that I should be aware of? I was forced to use my imagination to get some answers. Were my ancestors criminals? Or were my Irish predecessors captured, tortured and enslaved by Barbary pirates? Was there a scenario where they would miraculously escape this horrific experience? These inventive fantasies swirled in my head.
My brother, Craig and I did not know what nationality we were. We vowed to find out from our grandfather, Walter William Simmons, (1886-1978) when we returned to Iowa on a family vacation in the summer of 1966.
That summer, we asked our grandpa where we were from and he responded, "Do you mean where were we from before living in Iowa?"
We both said, "Yes, where were we from before the Simmons family moved to Iowa?"
He thought for a moment, then tapped his pipe against his favorite ash tray and looked up responding, "Oh, we were from Illinois."
We were feeling confused and not sure if he understood the importance or the significance of the question, so this time my older brother took the lead and again asked the question, "Ok, where were we from before we lived in Illinois?"
This time our grandpa replied, "Oh before living in Illinois, we were from New York."
We laughed and together my brother and I offered a tutorial in family lineage eventually asking, "What country were we from before New York? You know, like Italy, Ireland, or Germany?"
"Oh! That I couldn't tell ya." he said looking down and again tapping his pipe against the ash tray. He gave a wry smile and slowly loaded his favorite cherry blend tobacco into the bowl of his old pipe.
To this day, my brother Craig and I are not sure if our grandpa didn't know what nationality we were or if he was just having fun with his teenage grandkids. As a result of this lack of a national identity, throughout our teen years, all we knew was that we were Americans.
My dad, Dale, passed...
