Scott Simon

A common trait of many baby boomers is having grown up with a natural curiosity about our ethnic origins. Filmmaker Barry Levinson looked back at his family to make the poignant film, Avalon, about growing up in Baltimore. Now, NPR’s popular radio host Scott Simon, one of the nation’s more visible baby boomers, has written a new book - Windy City - inspired by his hometown, Chicago. Scott shares this excerpt with BoomerCafé:

Tuesday Night

The mayor was found shortly after eleven with his bronze, brooding face lying on the last two slices of a prosciutto and artichoke pizza, his head turned and his wide mouth gaping, as if gulping for a smashed brown bulb of garlic with life’s last breath. Blood from his gums had already seeped into the tomatoes, prosciutto, and caramelized onions. His blue oxford-cloth shirt was unbuttoned. His red tie had been slipped out of its knot and trailed forlornly from his collar. His heavy gray slacks were laid across the back of the sofa where he was sitting for his last meal, illumed by the cold glare of the television set.

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How many of us baby boomers have adopted our children? How many of us would consider adoption after we passed the age of 50?

Baby boomer and National Public Radio host Scott Simon, his wife Caroline and their first adopted daughter recently traveled to China to adopt their second daughter.

Scott shares his reflections with us … and there is a link at the end where you can listen to him read the essay.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and daughter and I heard a knock on the door of our hotel room in Nancheng, China, and opened it.

Talk about room service: two smiling people from an orphanage put our new baby into our arms. Her name is Lina, and she is beautiful. We began to cry.

But in the next instant, my wife blurted what was on both our minds: Lina didn’t look like her picture. The thumb-sized portrait we had received from the orphanage showed a chubby baby with apple cheeks sitting in a field of yellow flowers, puffy pink pants pulled to her chin. This baby put in our arms seemed smaller; and even a little pale.

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National Public Radio’s Scott Simon, host of Saturday Morning Edition and himself a baby boomer, recently amused us with a timely essay on air travel. He has given us his permission to share with the gang at BoomerCafé …

The Transportation and Safety Administration, which is often assailed for wasting resources by checking infants in strollers and grandmothers with walkers, faced criticism this week for trying to focus its efforts by keeping a list that apparently assigns some kind of Threat Assessment Level to each passenger.

By now, probably every flier has a favorite story of what looked like an absurdity: a toddler who was made to take off his tiny rubber shoes and get wanded; an elderly war veteran who had to remove his plastic leg.

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