I grew up believing that famous author James Michener might be my “real” father. I’m sure I’m not the only person who believes that our true family origins differ from what we’ve been told. I was born on December 21, 1943, in New York City, to Morris (Muni) Diamond and Edith Cohn 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 City.
My mom and dad met in 1927 at a Jewish Youth League meeting in Jacksonville. He moved to New York in 1929 to pursue an acting career. She wants to do adventure. His motto:
“Bring it on. I’ll try anything once.”
I grew up listening to romantic stories about his life in Greenwich Village, his political activism, and love despite being poor.
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 have heard stories from my mother’s younger sister, Florence, which suggest that my “origin story” may differ from the one told by my parents. I learned that there lived another young man in New York, a young writer, who was competing with my father for my mother’s affection.
James A. Michener is one of the world’s most popular authors. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his book stories of the south pacific and wrote over 40 epic best-selling novels Hawaii, Centennial, Texas, And Alaska. Although there is much mystery about James Michener’s early life, we do know that he left New York to join the Navy in 1943, the year I was born.
James A. Michener
In his memoir, The world is my home, Published when Michener was 85 years old, he began with a childhood memory.
“I have been inspired to attempt this project because it happened eighty years ago when I was a country boy of five, and was of such powerful import that the memory has never left me.”
“The farmer who lived at the end of the street had an old apple tree that was once abundantly productive, but now it had lost its energy and ability to bear fruit. I still remember the early spring day the farmer drove eight long and rusty nails into the trunk of the tree.”
“That autumn a miracle happened. The tired old tree, brought back to life, produced a bountiful crop of juicy red apples, bigger and better than any we had seen before. When I asked how it happened, the farmer explained: ‘Hammerin’ in the rusty nails gave him a jolt to remind him that his job was to produce apples.'”
“In the 1980s, when I was about eighty, I had some big, rusty nails driven into my torso – a quintuple bypass heart surgery, a new left hip, a tooth reconstruction, a permanent vertigo attack – and like the wise apple tree, I resolved to start bearing fruit again.”
“Between 1986 and 1991 I wrote eleven books, published seven of them, including two very long ones, and the other three were completed in their third revisions and awaiting publication. It was an almost indecent display of frenetic industry, but it was done slowly, carefully, every morning at the typewriter and every afternoon on research or quiet reflection.”
James Michener died on 16 October 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. He was part of a generation of artists whose commitment to social justice and the working class ultimately made them targets during the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. In later 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”.
An article on 22 May 1996 San Francisco Chronicle Title “Request for SF Puppet Man.”
“Tenderloin said goodbye to puppet man Tommy Roberts with tears in his eyes and cookies in his mouth. The puppets were there, sitting at a small table. There was a king, a dog, a scarecrow, and a bunch of little men. All were silent, an unusual situation for the Tommy Roberts puppeteer, who worked harder than any other puppeteer in history.”
“If they could have talked without him, they would have recited the poet about Union Square, or the public library. Over the past thirty years, Roberts had a way of showing up on college campuses and city parks with a paper bag full of tattered homemade hand puppets. The puppets, only slightly smaller than their 4-foot-8 master, would share Roberts’ poetry without asking.”
“The Puppet Man died last month at the age of 89. ‘My father was not successful by society’s standards,’ his son Jed Diamond said at his memorial service. ‘He didn’t make a lot of money. He was diagnosed as mentally ill. He loved being among people who society pretends don’t exist.’
“A month before his death, he had asked his son to go with him to the new library under construction in San Francisco. ‘It took us about an hour to get there,’ Jed said. ‘He loved books and he 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 reflects my father’s sentiments:
public Library-
Here is my church, my palace, my sacred halls.
Here I am the brave warrior, the victorious leader,
Gypsy Wild – Dreamer, artist, poet, wide-eyed child.
Here I have been raised and fed with spirit bread.
Here I have evolved from a creeping provincial fanatic
For the standing, seeking, universal man.
The search for truth and light to illuminate the night of the mind.
From dreamers made from our native soil.
jade diamond
I’ll be 83 at the end of this year and for over fifty years I have been a leader in the field of gender-specific therapy and men’s mental, emotional and relational health. I have written 17 books including international bestsellers surviving male menopause And Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Major Causes of Depression and Aggression.
I feel like I’ve got at least ten years of productive life ahead of me and I have my own health challenges including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. James Michener may not be my biological father, but he has certainly been a mentor and guide to me throughout my life.
My work as a healer began when I was five years old after my middle-aged father overdosed on sleeping pills. When he was no longer able to earn a living to support his family by doing his favorite job, he became more depressed.
Fortunately, he did not die but was committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me, and what I could do to save other families from 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 stop the feelings of despair that cause so many people to want to end their lives. I soon found medical school to be very elitist and limited in the kind of treatment I thought necessary.
I transferred to UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare where I earned a master’s degree and developed a full-time practice helping men, women, and families. At the age of sixty, I returned to school and received a PhD in International Health. My dissertation study was published as a book, Male vs. female depression: Why men act out and women act inside.
my book, My Distant Father: Healing the Wound of the Family Father Traced a healing journey that spanned several generations. i have one online courses For those who want to explore their father’s wound.
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