By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Laura Simon’s celebration of her 106th birthday prompted a dramatic and literary convention of sorts, as family members gathered Saturday around their matriarch at the Patrician Retirement Home. It was one of the rare occasions that the far-flung family was able to be together.
Simon’s son, Mayo, 83, is a former Hollywood screenwirter with the pilot episode of Man from Atlantis being among his credits before he moved to New York City to become a playwright for the legitimate stage. Some of his works have been loosely based on his long-lived mother, including Going West, “a one-character play about an old lady having to leave her apartment in San Diego” and An Old Lady’s Guide to Survival, which just closed in Mexico City after 630 performances and will open in April in Milan, Italy.
Mayo’s oldest daughter, Francesca, in from London with her husband, mathematician Martin Stamp, and their son Joshua, is a well-known children’s book author. Her 96-story series about Horrid Henry has won numerous awards including the Children’s Book of the Year Award in 2008 for Horrid Henry and the Abonimable Snowman. Francesca has read at 10 Downing Street for former P.M. Tony Blair’s children, and has been presented to Queen Elizabeth II, according to her father.
Mayo’s younger daughter, Anne Simon, won fame in Hollywood as the science advisor to the popular science fiction television series The X-Files, and subsequently wrote a book based on the series called The Real Science Behind the X-Files: Microbes, Meteorites and Mutants. She is a professor of viology at the University of Maryland, as well as a senior editor of the Journal of Virology.
Joshua, representing a fourth generation in the Simon family, is completing his undergraduate studies in religion at Cambridge University, but spends most of his extra-curricular time directing plays, according to his grandfather.
Before fellow residents at the Patrician sang “happy birthday” to Laura Simon and shared in some traditional birthday cake, the great-grandmothers who at 100 wrote a book of her own — I’m Still Here — introduced members of her family as well as friends to the assembled group and had each tell a little bit about himself or herself.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com