Sylvia Simon

Born in Chicago in 1916

I met Sylvia by chance in Berkeley in 1978. We quickly discovered that we were distant relatives; my paternal grandmother and her mother were cousins.
We became instant family and friends.

Sylvia learned to take care of business when she was still a young child. “What choice did I have?” she says, “My mother only wanted to sing.” The second child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she grew up in the shadow of an uninhibited mother who entertained friends, neighbors, and passersby with songs in six languages.

As practical as her mother was impractical, Sylvia trained as a beautician after graduating from high school and later joined her father in his small bridal veil business. One day while Sylvia was working in the back of the shop, a gunman barged through the front door, robbed the cash register, and shot her father dead. Sylvia, then married and a mother of two young children, closed her father’s business.  “My mother and brother had nervous breakdowns and my husband wasn’t ambitious. Who else was going to support the family?” Stifling her own grief, Sylvia spent weeks in the Chicago Public Library researching ideas for a business. Capitalizing on the 1950s craze for handmade costume jewelry, she started a mail-order business based on designs she adapted from ancient jewelry exhibited at the Art Institute. The business flourished, comfortably supporting Sylvia’s family and her mother and brother.

In 1976, Sylvia sold her company and moved with her husband to Berkeley. An early advocate of alternative medicine and progressive politics, she found the like-minded community she had lacked in Chicago. Not long retired, Sylvia soon turned her house in north Berkeley into a business, adding two rental units and renting out the extra bedrooms to foreign students until her mother came to live with her. Sylvia cared for mother until she died at age 92.

After her husband died, Sylvia took in a 17-year old Chinese immigrant and embraced him as her son.  For the next decade, she guided his education and helped him launch a successful career. He, in turn, invited her to China to meet his family. After he returned to China, Sylvia’s social life took another turn. She was “adopted” by a group of middle-aged gay men as the mother they all would have wanted. Then in her 80s, she spent weekends going to plays, dinner, and out for drives with her new of friends--and attending their weddings as the honored guest.

In 1994, she rented a room in her house to a middle-aged college instructor who became her close friend. As her eyesight dimmed and her health deteriorated, he promised to look after her until she died. Now 93, legally blind, and breathing through oxygen tubes, she has been bedridden for the past three years.  “It isn’t easy,” she says, “but how can I complain? I’m surrounded by wonderful people, and I’m in my own home.”

Honored by Deanne Stone