I already knew who John Y. Simon was when I started classes at Carbondale thanks to my mom dragging me to civil war battlefields on family vacations. What made his courses so appealing was that, besides being a nationally recognized historian, he was an amazing storyteller. He gave the most entertaining lectures of any class I took.
I adopted many of the stories from his Illinois History class as my own and still entertain or bore friends with them during road trips through the state. One of my favorites was about the nation's first serial killers, the Harp Brothers, and the sordid history of Cave-in-Rock. He made the grim story exciting and somehow funny at the same time.
The first time I took one of his courses I wore a Fort Sumter t-shirt during the second week of class. It was a vacation souvenir. He was walking around the classroom as he lectured and stopped mid sentence when he noticed my shirt and shouted, "Fort Sumter! I love Fort Sumter. That's a wonderful t-shirt!" He spent the next 10 minutes on a tangent about Fort Sumter. For the rest of the semester he referred to me as Fort Sumter, long after he knew my real name, and would randomly comment on how much he liked the historic site.
I talked with him a few times after college. I heard him speak at Fort Donelson where he remarked that Kentucky seems to have the attitude that they joined the confederacy retroactively under the leadership of Colonel Sanders. He always had a joke and a smile.
I managed to get an A in all of his classes which made me like him even more. He always made me glad I went to school at SIUC. For the last few years I thought of stopping by his office in Carbondale to pick his brain about re-evaluating Grant's unpopular Presidency from a civil rights perspective considering that it took federal action nearly 100 years later to finish the job of guaranteeing equal rights. Maybe Grant's reconstruction policies were stopped prematurely. I waited too long to ask.