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This can-do optimism is a trait that Simon inherited from his father Martin, who died of leukemia in 1969. Martin and Ruth Simon were Lutheran missionaries in China before Martin accepted a pastorate in Eugene a month prior to the birth of their oldest son Paul in 1928. In the early 1930s, the Simons began publishing religious pamphlets out of their home, as well as a monthly magazine called the Christian Parent. Ruth Simon recalls, "When we went into business, we didn't have a dime of our own." A monthly treat was a Sunday after-church lunch at the Rex Cafe in downtown Eugene, where Paul and his younger brother Arthur would order chicken a la king for 35 cents.
Martin wanted his sons to go into the ministry, an ambition that Arthur later fulfilled. But Paul's dreams were shaped by reading the autobiography of William Allen White, the publisher of the Emporia (Kans.) Gazette. "In grade school," Arthur says, "Paul began talking about owning a weekly newspaper and going into politics." To this day, Simon remains a devout Lutheran layman.
In quest of a more central location for their business, the Simons moved to Highland, Ill., some 35 miles from St. Louis, in 1946. Paul enrolled at Dana College, a Lutheran school in Blair, Neb. He was a little more than a year short of graduation when his parents discovered that the weekly paper in nearby Troy, Ill., was about to fold. With the help of a $3,600 loan guaranteed by the local Lions Club, Paul Simon, 19, was the publisher and owner of the Troy Tribune. "I wanted to be the Walter Lippmann of my generation," he explains, "and this looked better than writing obituaries."
With a circulation of about 1,000, the Tribune was a sleepy small-town weekly -- until its boy editor stumbled on punchboard gambling in Madison County. With the impetuousness of youth, Simon unearthed a daisy chain of gambling and prostitution operating under the protection of local officials. A typical issue of the Tribune would combine an angry front-page editorial decrying gambling with an earnest column by the editor ("Trojan Thoughts") singing the praises of church camps.
Simon spent the Korean War as an Army private in West Germany, interrogating East German defectors. A diary he briefly kept during this period tends toward the prosaic: "Attended Easter Service in downtown Stuttgart. Went away very much uninspired." Back in Troy, he mounted an uphill campaign for state representative in 1954 "to show that you could beat the system." By dint of his innate friendliness and the hard work of shaking 30,000 hands, he succeeded.
As a reform legislator in a machine-dominated state, Simon found life in Springfield lonely, until a few like-minded colleagues were elected in 1956. One of them was Jeanne Hurley, a liberal Democratic lawyer from the Chicago suburb of Wilmette. "Long before Paul and I fell in love," she recalls, "we were working together as colleagues." Simon proposed on their second date. This being the 1950s, Hurley reconciled herself to giving up her legislative seat, though even today one can hear hints of regret over abandoning her dream of becoming a judge. Their respective religions were a more serious problem -- for the parents. Martin Simon was initially opposed to the match. At one point, his son asked, "Dad, if I married the worst drunk in the county and she was a Lutheran, then would it be all right?"