By Elizabeth Cloutman
 Photo by Joe Hu, Town Crier |
Bob Simon and Bob Pearl share poetry with the community
Los Altos residents Bob Simon and Bob Pearl have buried the notion that poetry is somehow irrelevant and incomprehensible. The enthusiastic response from their many community audiences validate the popularity of their genre.
For the past 30 years, Simon has composed poems, many inspired by events in his own life. For just the last two years, Pearl has been performing others’ poetry, celebrating the life of the cowboy in the Old West. Both weave stories in rhyme, donating their time and efforts to community organizations. While the poems might be called “light verse,” Simon and Pearl say they seem to touch the heart of the listener.
Simon said all of his poems have a story behind them. At his presentations, he precedes each poem with a brief introduction.
He has written poems for special moments in his own life such as “318,” which commemorates the last white Christmas the family would spend in his daughter’s Ohio home, because Suzi, her husband and children, were moving to Austin, Texas. He wrote “Once a Blond” as an act of love when his wife was unsettled by a friend’s remark, “Annie, you are really gray!”
More formal events have inspired other poems: weddings, a fund-raiser for the Los Altos Public Library, a bond campaign for the Los Altos School District and the dedication of the veterans memorial at Shoup Park in 1998. ABC Nightline anchor and Stanford alumnus Ted Koppel read Simon’s “Centennial, the Poem” at Stanford University’s 100th anniversary in 1991.
While Simon had made a few casual attempts at poetry as a teen, it was a comment by a Stanford Research Institute colleague about his beard that led him, at age 37, to his first serious poetic effort, “Elizabeth’s Christmas.”
“I can’t explain it. I wasn’t writing poetry before it,” Simon said. “It was 1968 and my wife Annie and I were just returning from 18 months in India. While I was there, I had grown a beard. I heard from a friend that a colleague, Elizabeth Atwater, had told her she didn’t like my beard.”
Simon was designated Atwater’s “Secret Santa” for the institute’s Christmas party. He decided to compose a poem to include with his gift. In “Elizabeth’s Christmas,” Simon reminded his colleague that Santa Claus, like Simon, had a beard. After reciting the poem, “Secret Santa” Simon kissed Atwater on the cheek.
Simon left SRI when he accepted a position as the assistant dean for capital development at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, but his colleague never forgot him.
“Perhaps 10 years after the event, Elizabeth died of cancer. At her memorial service, other colleagues and I lined up to pay our respects to her mother and sisters,” Simon said. “When I introduced myself to Elizabeth’s mother, she said, ‘Oh, you’re my favorite! Do you know why?’ … I knew, just as surely as I was standing there, what she meant. I replied, ‘I think I do.’” Simon said he wondered if his poem had been an annual tradition for his colleague’s family, but never asked her mother.
Simon noted his poems “are written to be heard.” For many years, they remained unpublished. Then, at a library fund-raiser, he met Marge Bruno, who invited him to give a program to the Los Altos Rotary Club. At the Rotary Club, illustrator Mary Burkhardt suggested he publish his poems. Two years ago, Simon published “Fleeting Rhyme,” designed by Burkhardt’s husband and illustrated by Burkhardt herself.
Since the book was published, Simon has given more than 60 presentations in two states. He donates the earnings to charity. He is now developing a DVD in response to the many who said, “It’s too bad, Bob, that we can’t take you home with the book.”
Speaking about the events in his life and career that gave him the confidence to write and perform his own poetry, he said, “I find one thing leads to another in life. It’s all in how we respond to it.”
If Pearl had heard Simon’s statement, he would undoubtedly have agreed. When Pearl retired from his job as Space Designs Inc.’s chief financial officer five years ago, he purposefully took his life in another direction. This led to his newfound love for cowboy poetry, which he shares with schools, churches and many community groups.
“Everything I do, I do as a volunteer,” he said. “I do it for the love of it.
“I think when someone retires, you should absolutely do something totally different than what your profession is,” Pearl said in the soft West Virginia drawl he has retained despite living in Los Altos for the past 36 years. “At (Foothills Congregational Church), they talk about my doing some kind of financial job. That’s the last thing I want to do.”
Pearl said he had wanted to join a Toastmasters International group to hone his public speaking skills ever since the mid-1960s, when he was a graduate student earning a master’s degree in business administration at Golden Gate University. After his retirement, he joined the Early Risers Toastmasters. There he began telling stories about his native Appalachia.
Telling stories was not only a regional tradition but a Pearl family tradition, he said. He recalled many happy hours spent on the front porch of his Glen Jean, W.Va., home, listening to his father tell about the events of the day. At the time, Glen Jean was a coal-mining town, and his father ran the company-owned gas station there.
Pearl enjoyed storytelling so much, he joined the South Bay Storytellers, a group of 10-12 people, who meet monthly at the Los Altos United Methodist Church. He also began attending national storytelling conventions.
While attending one such convention two years ago in Jonesborough, Tenn., Pearl heard his first cowboy poet. Even though he had never cared for poetry, he was hooked. The cowboy poets that he met, “reminded me a lot of the people I grew up with in the Appalachian mountains. I liked their values. There’s similar dialog in the Appalachian stories and the cowboy poems … It changed my life.”
Pearl bills himself as the Appalachian cowboy and has performed at area schools, churches, senior centers and community groups. He specializes in writers from cowboy poetry’s “golden age,” 1900-1930: Bruce Kiskaddon, Henry Herbert Knibbs, Charles Badger Clark and S. Omar Barker. He also performs more contemporary poetry, which tends to be more humorous. Since 1985, there has been a renaissance in cowboy poetry.
“There are now more than 200 festivals in the United States every year,” he said. He has joined the Monterey Cowboy Festival board of directors. Cowboy poets, ranging in professions from physicians to real cowboys, attend the annual event each December, he said.
Pearl said he believed the isolation of cowboys’ lives inspired the poetry and the music they composed. Pearl himself uses solitude to learn the poems, practicing while walking, biking or exercising. It takes him about a month to master a poem. He has given up storytelling for the time being to devote himself to cowboy poetry; although he still enjoys giving speeches at Toastmasters meetings.
“(Poetry’s) a risky business,” he said. “You don’t have to be precise with telling stories, but in poetry, you do.”
When he’s performing, Pearl dresses as a cowboy, with a black Stetson hat, leather vest, Western shirt, jeans, a silver belt buckle and a red kerchief. Like Simon, he sets the scene for his audience, explaining the background of a poet and the themes of cowboy poetry.
Last month, it was clear by the expression on the faces of many of Sharon Freita’s students at the Mountain View-Los Altos Adult Education Center that Pearl’s enthusiasm for cowboy poetry was contagious.
Pearl and Simon’s humor, solid sense of identity, values and a love of telling stories come through loud and clear in rhyme.
Pearl is scheduled to share some of his favorite poems with the Garden House Senior Association, 7:30 p.m., June 12, at the Garden House, Shoup Park, 400 University Ave., following a 5:30 p.m. potluck dinner. For reservations, call 321-4626.
To contact Simon, call 948-9054 or send e-mail to Bob@LogoToGo.com. To contact Pearl, call 948-5615.
