James Michener, My Father and Me: Finding Our Place in the World and Embracing the Mysteries of Life

I grew up believing that the famous author James Michener could 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 Maurice (Mooney) Diamond and Edith Cohn Diamond. My father was born on December 17, 1906 in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother was born on 6 Oct 1908 in Toledo, Ohio. James A. Michener was born on February 3, 1907, in New York City.

My mother and father met at a Jewish Youth League meeting in Jacksonville in 1927. They moved to New York in 1929—she to pursue an acting career. He is up for adventure. His motto:

Bring it on. I’ll try something sometime.

I grew up hearing romantic stories about their lives in Greenwich Village, their 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 failed 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 the story my parents told me. I found out that there was another young man living in New York, a young writer, who was competing with my father for my mother’s affections.

James A. Michener is one of the world’s most popular authors. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his book Tales of the South Pacific and has written 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 in 1943, the year I was born, to join the Navy.

James A. Michener

In his memoirs, Earth is my home, When Michener published at age 85, he began with childhood memories.

I was inspired to attempt this project because of an experience that occurred eighty years ago when I was a country boy of five and had such a strong import that the memory has not left me.

The farmer living at the end of the lane had an old apple tree that was once very productive but had lost its vigor and ability to bear any fruit. The farmer, on the first day of spring, I still remember, drove eight nails, long and rusty, into the trunk of the tree.

A miracle happened that fall. The tired old tree bounced back to life and produced a bumper crop of juicy red apples, bigger and better than any we’ve seen before. When I asked how it was done, the farmer explained: ‘Hammerin’ hammered it into a rusty nail to remind it that its job was to produce apples.’

In the 1980s, when I was about eighty years old, I had quite a few rusty nails on my trunk — a quintuple bypass heart surgery, a new left hip, a dental reconstruction, bouts of permanent vertigo — and like the wise apple tree, I decided to start bearing fruit again.

Between 1986 and 1991 I would write eleven books, publishing seven of them, including two very long books, and the remaining three having completed their third revision and awaiting publication. It was an almost crude display of frenetic art, but it was conducted slowly, carefully, every morning at the typewriter and every afternoon in research or quiet reflection.

James Michener died on October 16, 1997 at the age of 90.

Maurice (Mooney) Diamond

My father died on April 26, 1996 at the age of 89. Although he pursued his dream of becoming an actor in New York and later a playwright in Hollywood, he never became famous. He was part of a generation of artists whose commitment to social justice and the working class eventually became their targets during the McCarthy era and Red Square. Later in life, he was known as “Tommy Roberts, the Puppet Man” as a street puppeteer in Los Angeles and later in San Francisco.

An article on May 22, 1996 San Francisco Chronicle Titled “Request for SF Doll People.”

Tenderloin bid farewell to the puppet man Tommy Roberts, with tears in his eyes and a cookie in his mouth. The dolls were there, sitting on a small table. There was a king, a dog, a scarecrow and a group of little men. Everyone was silent, an unusual situation for a Tommy Roberts puppet, which worked harder than any other marionette in history.

If they could talk without him, they would recite the poet’s speech in Union Square or the public library. For the past thirty years, Roberts has had a way of showing up on college campuses and in city parks with paper bags full of homemade hand puppets. The puppets, slightly smaller than their 4-foot-8 master, would share Roberts’ poems without being asked.

The doll man died last month at the age of 89. ‘My father was not successful by society’s standards,’ his son Jade Diamond said in his memoirs. ‘He didn’t make much money. He was diagnosed as mentally ill. He preferred to be among people who had no pretense of society.

A month before he died, he asked his son to accompany him to the new San Francisco library that was still under construction. ‘It took us about an hour to get there,’ Jade said. ‘He loved books and wanted to leave his poems, public libraries, to the workers. After some rest he said to me It’s time to go home. The first stanza of the poem captures my father’s spirit:

Public Library-

Here is my cathedral, my castle, my holy hall.

Here I am the brave knight, the conquering leader,

Gypsy Wild – Dreamer, artist, poet, wide-eyed child.

Here I was nurtured and fed with the bread of the soul.

Here I grew out of provincial bigotry

Standing, wanted, universal man.

Seeking truth and light to brighten the night of the mind.

From visionaries made from our native clay.’

Jade Diamond

I will be 83 later this year and for more than fifty years I have been a leader in gender-specific medicine and men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. I have written 17 books including international best sellers Surviving male menopause And Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing 4 Root Causes of Depression and Aggression.

I feel like I have at least ten more years of productive life and I have my own health challenges that have been diagnosed Have bipolar disorder. James Michener may not have been my biological father, but he has certainly been a lifelong mentor and guide to me.

My work as a healer began early when my middle-aged father overdosed on sleeping pills when I was five. He became increasingly depressed when he could not earn a living to support his family by doing what he loved.

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 spare other families the pain and suffering that our family had to endure.

After my graduation from UC Santa Barbara, I went to medical school. I wanted to become a psychiatrist and help prevent the feelings of depression that make so many men want to end their lives. I soon found medical school too elitist and limited the kind of healing I knew was necessary.

I transferred to the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare where I earned a master’s degree and built a full-time practice helping men, women and families. At sixty, I went back to school and got a PhD in international health. My dissertation was published as a book, Male vs. Female Depression: Why Men Act and Women Act.

my book My Distant Father: Healing the Wounds of the Family Father Explores healing journeys that span generations. I have one Online courses For those who want to explore their own father’s wounds.

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This post was Previously published on Menalive.com.