Fannie Simon papers

Fannie Simon was born in New York City on April 15, 1891, the daughter of Julius and Bertha Gubner Simon. Her father emigrated from Germany in 1885 and was able to make a prosperous living for his family as a clothier. Thus Fannie Simon grew up in Westchester and on the Upper West Side, with live-in servants and horseback riding in Central Park with her brother, Alexander. In 1930 Simon moved to the Murray Hill section of Manhattan where she would live for the next fifty years. She attended Smith College, graduating in 1914, and began working two years later, first in advertising then in the magazine industry, primarily as on-staff librarian. In 1932 Simon joined the Special Libraries Association, an organization she remained active in until her death. She was an avid supporter of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the New York Philharmonic Society, very active in New York City Republican Club and the Smith College Alumnae Association, and was active in the Church of the Incarnation, and her neighborhood association, the Murray Hill Committee. When she retired from McCall's Magazine in 1959, as librarian and associate editor, Simon volunteered much of her time to even more causes including, at the time of her death, working as the coordinator of a program of conversational English for the English-Speaking Union. Perhaps Simon's greatest passion was world travel which began when she was a child traveling to Europe with her family. Shortly before she died, Simon remarked to a friend that she estimated that she had traveled to over 150 countries, often traveling alone as she did at the age of 89 when she took what turned out to be her last trip to Iceland in September 1980. She published a few travel articles but her full-length manuscript, "Following Fannie in a Changing World," remains unpublished. Simon died in a traffic accident in New York City on October 20, 1980; she was eighty- nine years old.