I grew up believing that the famous author James Michener might be my “real” father. I’m sure I’m not the only person who thinks our real family origins are different than what we’ve been told. I was born on December 21, 1943 in New York to Morris (Muni) Diamond and Edith Kohn Diamond. My father was born on December 17, 1906 in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother was born on October 6, 1908 in Toledo, Ohio. James A. Michener was born on February 3, 1907 in New York.
My mom and dad met in 1927 at a meeting of the Jewish Youth League in Jacksonville. They moved to New York in 1929 – He to pursue an acting career. To pursue adventure. Her motto:
“Bring it on. I’ll try anything once.”
I grew up hearing romantic stories about their life in Greenwich Village, their political activism, and being poor but in love.
The official story was that they met, fell in love and married in 1934. They tried to conceive but were unsuccessful until an experimental procedure of injecting my father’s sperm into my mother’s womb was successful and created the new life that is me. Over the years I heard stories from my mother’s younger sister, Florence, that suggested my “origin story” might be different than what my parents told me. I learned that there was another young man, a young writer living in New York, who was competing with my father for my mother’s affections.
James A. Michener is one of the most popular authors in the world. He won the Pulitizer Prize in 1948 for his book Stories of the South Pacific and wrote more than 40 bestselling epic novels including Hawaii, Centennial, Texas, and Alaska. Although there is a great deal of mystery surrounding James Michener’s early life, we do know that he left New York in 1943, the year I was born, to join the navy.
James A. Michener
In his memoirs, The world is my home, published when Michener was 85, begins with a childhood memory.
“I have been prompted to attempt this work because of an experience which occurred eighty years ago, when I was a country boy of five, and was so powerful that the memory has never left me.”
“The farmer who lived at the end of the lane had an old apple tree that had once been abundantly productive but had now lost its vigor and ability to bear fruit. The farmer, one early spring day that I still remember, drove eight nails, long and rusty, into the trunk of the tree.”
“That autumn a miracle happened. The tired old tree, after coming back to life, produced a great crop of juicy red apples, bigger and better than we had seen before. When I asked how this happened, the farmer explained: The ‘Hammerin’ on the rusty nails shocked him to remind him that his job is to produce apples.
“In the 1980s, when I was almost eighty years old, I had hammered some pretty big rusty nails into my torso—a quintuple heart bypass operation, a new left hip, a dental reconstruction, a bout of permanent vertigo—and like the sane apple tree, I decided to bear fruit again.
“Between the years 1986 and 1991 I would write eleven books, publish seven of them, including two very extensive ones, and complete the other three in their third revisions and await publication. It was an almost indecent display of frantic industry, but it was done slowly, carefully, every morning every afternoon at the typewriter and at the typewriter.’
James Michener died on October 16, 1997 at the age of 90.
Morris (Muni) Diamond
My father died on April 26, 1996 at the age of 89. He never became famous although he fulfilled his dream of becoming an actor in New York and later a playwright in Hollywood. They were part of the generation of artists whose commitment to social justice and the working class eventually made them targets during the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. Later in life, he was best known as a street puppeteer in Los Angeles and later in San Francisco under his stage name, “Tommy Roberts, the Puppet Man”.
On May 22, 1996 an article in San Francisco Chronicle entitled ‘Requiem for SF Puppet Man’.
“The filet said good-bye to Tommy Roberts, the puppet man, with tears in his eyes and biscuits in his mouth. The puppets were there, sitting at a little table. There was a king, a dog, a scarecrow, and a bunch of little people. All were silent, an unusual condition for a Tommy Roberts puppet, who worked hardest in history.”
“If they could speak without him, they would recite the poet for Union Square or she for the public library. For the past thirty years, Roberts has had a way of appearing on college campuses and in city parks with paper bags filled with tattered hand-made puppets. The puppets, only slightly smaller than their 4-foot poet, without asking their 4-foot poet.”
“The puppet man died last month, aged 89. ‘By society’s standards my father was not successful,’ his son Jed Diamond said at his memorial service. ‘He didn’t make a lot of money. He was labeled as mentally ill. He liked living among people that society pretends don’t exist.
“A month before he died, he asked his son to walk with him to the new San Francisco library that was still under construction. “It took us almost an hour to get there,” Jed said. “He loved books and wanted to leave his poem, The Public Library, for the workers. After a short rest he told me it’s time to go home. The first paragraph of the poem captures my father’s spirit:
Public Library-
Here is my cathedral, my castle, my hallowed halls.
Here I am a brave knight, a victorious leader,
Gypsy Wild — dreamer, artist, poet, wide-eyed child.
Here I have been nurtured and fed on alcoholic bread.
Here I grew up from a creeping provincial bigot
To the upright, sought after, global man.
Finding truth and light to illuminate the night of the mind.
From dreamers made from our native clay.”
Jed Diamond
I will be 83 later this year and for over fifty years I have been a leader in the field of Gender-Specific Medicine and men’s mental, emotional and relational health. I have written 17 books, including international bestsellers Surviving male menopause and The Irritable Man Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Root Causes of Depression and Aggression.
I feel like I have at least ten more years of productive life and I’ve had my own health challenges, including being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. James Michener may not be my biological father, but he has certainly been a mentor and guide to me.
My work as a therapist began early when my middle-aged father overdosed on sleeping pills when I was five. He had become increasingly depressed when he could not make a living to support his family doing the work he loved.
Luckily, he didn’t die, but he was taken to the Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to prevent other families from experiencing the pain and suffering that our family went through.
After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, I went to medical school. I wanted to become a psychiatrist and help prevent the feelings of hopelessness that lead too many men to want to end their lives. I soon found medical school too elitist and restrictive for the kind of treatment I knew was necessary.
I transferred to the UC Berkeley School of Social Work where I earned a master’s degree and developed a full-time practice helping men, women and families. At age sixty, I went back to school and got a PhD in International Health. My thesis was published as a book, Male vs. Female Depression: Why Men Act Out and Women Act In.
my book My Distant Dad: Healing the Wound of the Father of the Family explore the healing journey that spanned many generations. i have one online course for those who want to explore their father’s wound.
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