Meeting My Father for the First Time--At Age 60

Just over seventy years ago, on May 3, 1953, my father Simon Gerson died at the age of 34.?He had suffered from rheumatic heart disease which resulted from an infection caught when he was a young boy living in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, PA.?Antibiotics were not widely available back then.?Nor would they have been affordable as the family was extremely poor.?Having lost everything, including his home, in the depression, my grandfather pushed a vegetable cart around the neighborhood and somehow managed to eek out a meagre livelihood.?I never knew my dad as I was born a little more than two weeks after his passing.

A decade ago, as I turned sixty, I found myself increasingly wondering about the biological father that I never knew.?Throughout my life I had heard little bits of information.?I knew he grew up dirt poor in Pittsburgh and attended (what was then) Carnegie Institute of Technology on a scholarship as an acting major.?He was an exceptionally talented actor forced to give that up because of a major heart attack in his twenties and so he became a theater director.?He had a sister Ethel whose husband Leonard (they were always “Uncle Pappy and Aunt Ethel) was one of my father’s closest friends.?Simon and Leonard were part of a very close trio of friends.?The other member was—believe it or not, Andy Warhol.?I knew that at one point Simon lived in Tucson, AZ for his health. Finally, I was aware that when my mom married Simon and chose to have children with him, she knew his life expectancy could be measured in a handful of years.?That was the extent of my knowledge.?By the time I turned 60, my mom had been gone for over 30 years and there was no one to ask the myriad of questions that ran through my mind.?

For reasons I don’t quite remember I became obsessed with finding out where Simon Gerson was buried.?I spent hours online looking at different sites that I hoped might contain some relevant information.?While on one or two occasions I found something encouraging, in the end I was left wondering where his final resting place might be.?Then something truly extraordinary happened.?While browsing online I found an extensive excerpt from a book entitled “Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater” by Lynne Conner (Univ of Pittsburgh Press: 2007) (I have no idea why this excerpt from such an obscure title was online).?There in chapter 7—"Theater as Regional Renaissance”—on page 142, was a reference to a theater director in Pittsburgh during the late 1940s by the name of Simon Gerson.?

I sent a letter off to the author explaining that, while I was not at all certain, I thought that the Simon Gerson mentioned on page 142 might be my father.?Did she have any additional information that she could share??She wrote back immediately telling me that she had nothing further but that she knew there was a document in the library at Carnegie Mellon University that dealt with the theater group she had referenced.?Perhaps if I contacted the school, they might give me access.?To my surprise and delight, Carnegie Mellon responded to my e-mail saying that if I sent them $12 for postage, they would send me the document so long as I promised to return it when I was finished.

That is how I came into possession of a master’s thesis entitled “The Curtaineers: A Study of an Interracial Dramatics Project of the Irene Kaufman Settlement of Pittsburgh from Its Inception, November 1943 to February 1948.”?What I found inside was my father, and it changed my life forever.

According to the document, the Curtaineers were a Pittsburgh theater group “dedicated to the best in dramatic art, and to the cause of democratic understanding.”?Simon Gerson, a graduate of the Drama School of Carnegie Institute of Technology, had lived in the Hill District for the greater part of his life.?“There was a feeling that he would fully appreciate the purpose for which the group had been organized and subscribe to the interracial policy toward which the agency was moving.”?In just under one hundred pages of text typed on an old manual typewriter I learned that the Curtaineers were among the first, if not the very first, racially integrated theater group in the United States.?My father was central to its mission and was interviewed extensively throughout the document.??He spoke of his commitment to racial justice and equality and of the policies he followed—choice of plays and casting—all intended to support those goals.?While I could only imagine what his voice might have sounded like, I felt like I was hearing him talk for the very first time in my life.?I was at the same time overcome by emotion and deeply humbled by who this man was and the values he had embraced.

Inspired by all this discovery I spent more time online and eventually came across an obituary for Meyer “Mickey” Gerson.?I had never heard of Meyer Gerson but strangely and inexplicably it indicated that he was the brother of the late Ethel Kessler, Simon Gerson and Sam Gerson as well as Freda Tanz.?I remember starring at it in disbelief for a long time trying to make sense of what I was seeing.?Simon Gerson had brothers and sisters in addition to Ethel.?I had an entire family of cousins living in Pittsburgh.?Perhaps most miraculous of all, Simon’s sister Freda was alive and living in Berkeley, CA.

My first phone call to Freda was the most extraordinary phone call of my life and the time that my wife and I spent with her at her home was filled with photos, memories of her older brother Simon and the books, playbills and other items which had belonged to Simon that she so graciously and lovingly turned over to me.

I remember the excitement and uncertainty of calling one of my newly discovered cousins in Pittsburgh. ?On my trip to Pittsburgh to meet everyone, one of my cousins took me to the theater at Carnegie Mellon where Simon Gerson had studied and performed.?There on one of the walls backstage was a plaque with his name on it.?Not very far away, at a cemetery on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, my original mission was finally successful.?I was able to stand graveside where Simon Gerson had been resting for sixty years.?I reflected on the brevity of his life, but its goodness and meaning and wondered about my own.??And I thought about the deep connections between a father and son and that we were never truly strangers.