Jimmy Ray Simmons

Dr. Jimmy “Jimmie” Ray Simmons, beloved husband of Dr. Carol Marie Simmons, father of Justin Floyd Simmons, father-in-law of Ashley Blair Lorenson, and grandfather of Kitty Marie Simmons (deceased) and James Tiberius Simmons, died of a heart attack at home in Seattle, Washington, in the early morning of Sunday, August 1, 2021. He was eighty-two years old, fit of mind and body, and in overall robust health.

Jim had suffered a stroke four months prior to his death, on March 28, just before he could make it in for a doctor's appointment for some pain he was having in his arm, on the way to his belated and much-anticipated birthday party (the first time he could safely be indoors with his immediate family in a year-and-a-half of Covid-19). The stroke was brought on by a-fibrillation and a blood clot that had developed in the heart and travelled to the brain. He spent three nights in the stroke clinic at Swedish Hospital, and was released to Justin and Ashley on little Jimmy’s second birthday. The only physical effect sustained was aphasia, but that was considerable, and over the next four months, under Carol’s care, Jim changed his diet, quit smoking his tobacco pipe, and diligently went to medical appointments and therapy. He made a nearly full recovery, but continued to have angina-like symptoms. His heart-attack occurred the day before a scheduled angiogram which, had it been performed sooner, might well have prevented his death. He went down strong and died quickly, as he would have wanted, in the house he loved.

Jim’s forebears were of rugged Ozark Mountain stock, and had migrated through the Midwest to the town of Simmons, Missouri, before eventually settling in Oregon. Jim was born in Newberg, Yamhill County, on March 10, 1939, to Agnes Nadine (Hinkle) and Ray John Simmons, the youngest of five children. His siblings in birth order were Merle Leslie, Don Cecil, Veta Arlene, and David Lewis (a high school baseball star who died tragically of cancer at the age of sixteen, the same year that Agnes had to have a cancerous lung removed). Jim would live to enjoy just five years at the end of his life as the family patriarch, as his parents and siblings each preceded him in death.

Jim’s brother Don wrote, "Jimmy was an instant big hit with all of us. He learned to talk at an early age and never relinquished his status as a champion conversationist. When he was five or six years old, he would leave our house and walk to Dad’s office at the far end of First Street. He would stop along the way and talk to Russ Gainer, the grocer; Nelson Frost, the city attorney; Ed Pack at the pool hall, or anyone else who would find time for a conversation.” – a recounting reminiscent of a young George Bailey on his paper route in Bedford Falls.

Fleeing life with their father (a farmer, turkey rancher, horse trader, paper mill worker, real estate salesman, barber, and virtuoso fiddler - but a man who could be cruel), Jim’s closest sister Veta swept him up as a young boy and moved him with her to Seattle, where their mother was already living and working as a cocktail waitress in waterfront seamen’s bars. They lived in apartments and struggled to get by. Jim attended McGilvra Elementary School, where many of his classmates and friends were residents of the wealthy, gated Broadmoor neighborhood. Seeing the disparities in fortune among his peers instilled in Jim an ambition to make something of himself.

A voracious reader from an early age, Jim was fascinated by tales of adventure and discovery of lands far away. One of his favorite books was the Count of Monte Cristo. His nephew, David Simmons, once visited the house on Queen Anne Hill where Jim and his mother settled after she was remarried in 1957 to a merchant seaman, noting, “Funny the things I remember, but one of them was Grandma showing me Uncle Jim's bedroom in the basement and how amazing that room seemed to me at the time… I recall the walls and ceiling were wooden slats like one would think a ship cabin might look in the old days.” Young Jim already knew that he was going places. On his sixth-grade report card, his teacher wrote, “Jimmie is a good student in all subjects from arithmetic to music. I should like some time to talk with you about your plans for his future education. He is a lad of outstanding ability and that should be nurtured and developed.”

Stories Jim told from his childhood were plentiful. Once, playing with matches behind Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, something caught aflame, and Jim was afraid he had burnt down the building and ran home to hide underneath his bed, listening for sirens. On another occasion, he was on a hunting trip with relatives, and shot a rabbit. Hearing its moans as it was dying convinced him that hunting was not an activity for him. Jim loved to tell about his father’s border collie, Joe, who would run errands to the store and back on command, and by all accounts was as intelligent as any human.

Jim graduated from Queen Anne High School in 1957, where he was popular and well-regarded by teachers and students alike. There, he led an active social life, and made life-long friends. He joined the Tsars fraternity, spent his off-time in pool halls, bowled, sang in the school choir, lettered in tennis, and broke his nose several times playing football, which - along with his piercing blue eyes and sandy hair - only enhanced his already classically handsome appearance. (Carol always likened him to a young Robert Mitchum.)

Jim joined the merchant marine in 1955, at the age of sixteen, and shipped out for three months on the freighter Oregon. In his journal, he wrote, “the purpose being travel, and the earning of money with which to go to school.” He started as a cook, and won extra money for shore leave as a prodigious poker player. Over subsequent summers, he would see the world. Among his less conventional occupations abroad was providing informal translation services between Spanish ladies-of-the-night and amorous sailors in Torremolinos, where he drank with Norman Mailer and Harry Hubert (owner of Harry's Bar, immortalized in James Michener's The Drifters), and discovered what would become a lifetime love of flamenco guitar music.

Jim hardly made enough money to eat during some of his long stays between ships, and he recalled once looking longingly at a chicken on the rotisserie through the window of Barcelona’s famed “Los Caracoles” restaurant. (In later years, he would take Carol and Justin there to dine in fine style, and Justin and his friends would return again in future years to enlist the maître d’ and patrons in raising “a toast to Jimmy Ray!”)

By the late 50s, Jim’s adventures were in full swing. He spent a year in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii, riding a Vespa around the island in true Bondian style. He and a friend went “on the road” together, driving cross-country from New York to California. He obtained his captain's license and sailed a sloop in the Caribbean, diving with friends for lobsters for a living - leading to perilous adventures swimming too close to sharks and one particular four-foot-long barracuda named Charley, and was once even lost at sea for days before his boat washed up on an island.

In 1961, Jim began studying history at the University of Washington, where he played on the tennis team, relaxed at the Blue Moon Tavern, and was eventually recruited to join the CIA. He was set to move to Washington D.C., but a change in his plans came in October of 1962 in the form of Carol Marie Watson, a beautiful recent divorcee and teacher, four years his senior. (A complete coincidence - Jim’s mentor at the University of Washington, Dick Emerson, was the husband of the woman who would become Justin’s mentor in Democratic politics, Pat Emerson, some 35 years later.)

Carol's mother, also a teacher, did not take to Jim at first, but later came to love him like a son, as their relationship grew into one of profound mutual respect. She offered to pay his tuition for the rest of his education if he stayed in Seattle, went to graduate school and became a teacher. Jim agreed, and he and Carol were married by a justice of the peace on February 18, 1963. (He would later spend time correcting the “radical” high-school papers of Carol’s student, Walt Crowley, who would go on to edit the Helix at the University of Washington and co-found HistoryLink.org.) To make ends meet, Jim held jobs as a painter, liquor store clerk, and door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

Jim was an academic and a public intellectual, who some have said was the most intelligent man they ever met. He held a B.A. in Far East and Slavic Studies, a M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction, and a Ph.D. in educational communications and technology from the University of Washington. He was a professor at several universities and a consultant for governmental and international agencies. He developed international graduate degree programs and authored numerous publications on an array of different subjects - and one (as yet) unpublished spy novel.

He was an educator in the Seattle Public Schools for thirty-five years: a teacher of history, social studies, and film; a multicultural curriculum consultant; a central office administrator; and principal at Summit K-12 Alternative School, John Marshall Alternative High School (at the time, the largest school for at-risk youth in the nation), and the African American Academy, where he once received a Kente cloth in recognition by members of the African American community.

In 1992, while Jim was principal at Marshall, he was struck by a car driven by an angry student and had his leg pinned between two bumpers. He nearly lost his leg, but never blamed the student (who was not angry at him, but at another student), and made a full recovery. Ever the survivor, Jim underwent double-bypass surgery in 2001, and again made a full recovery.

Jim effectively administrated complex schools and taught underserved students who had slipped through the cracks in the system or been dropped by traditional schools. He refused to teach in one school because the principal used corporal punishment, and Jim did not condone punitive discipline. He helped design the Seattle Public Schools' Desegregation Plan, which was the first voluntary plan of its kind in the nation. He was a student advocate who believed strongly in integration, and that all students should have an equal opportunity to learn. Jim did not believe in out-of-school suspensions, but rather that all students could and would learn, given the chance to stay in school.

Professionally and as a community activist, Jim received numerous awards, and served on the boards of Citizens for Quality Integrated Education, the Seattle United Nations Association, the Human Relations Coordinating Council, the Coalition for the Education of Black Children, the Samoan Educational Task Force, and the Metropolitan Urban League of Greater Seattle. He was an active member of the Metropolitan Democratic Club of Seattle, and was appointed an honorary elder by the Urban Native Education Alliance, and a Washington State General by Lieutenant Governor John A. Cherberg. He was a board member and advisor of the University of Washington Alumni Association's Multicultural Alumni Partnership (MAP), and worked tirelessly to make it a success, in order to honor students and distinguished alumni of color at the University of Washington.

Jim traveled the world over many times, visited or lived in 87 countries, and spoke fluent Spanish, as well as conversational Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian and Esperanto. Throughout his career, he took Carol and Justin traveling the world with him. In 1975, they joined him in Caracas, Venezuela, where Jim spent a year as a teacher and consultant to the Venezuelan Ministry of Education. After retiring from the Seattle schools in 1994, Jim continued to consult for educational institutions, owned and operated an import-export company and a travel agency, made many trips with family and friends, chartered boats to sail with friends from his doctoral program in 9 different countries, and cruised around the world each year with Carol on luxury Cunard and other ocean liners.

At 20 world cruises, Jim certainly achieved his goal of raising his station in life. He enjoyed winning tournaments in deck paddle tennis, singing in the ship’s choir, dancing with Carol in their formal regalia, being frequently seated at the Captain’s or Commodore’s tables, and making close friends with lords and ladies. Effortlessly, he “walked with kings, but never lost the common touch.”

Jim and Carol’s 2020 world cruise was suddenly cut short as Covid-19 was named a pandemic, forcing them to fly home from Australia. Following Jim’s stroke, they made plans to return to sea, and to take Justin, Ashley and two-year-old Jimmy on a trip to Hawaii (where they had first taken Justin at the age of two), but those plans never developed, as Jim’s life ended four months later. His last few years were not easy, enduring the constraints of Covid, the stillbirth of a granddaughter, consecutive knee surgeries for Justin, medical complications following the birth of young Jimmy, and a stroke. But his spirits were undaunted, and he remained eager and able to help everyone with everything, as always.

Jim was a great man, an extraordinary man, a Renaissance man, a man for all seasons, a self-made man, a true gentleman and a life-long scholar, who loved collecting quotations, so fond of reading that he would pick up a novel at a traffic light to savor a few written words. He was a man who embodied all the highest values: honor, fairness, honesty, reason, kindness, composure, patience, respectfulness, positivity, urbanity, civility – and in trying times, Olympian calm. Mild-mannered and sensitive, cheerful and pleasant, sweet and gentle by nature, he had a delightfully dry and understated sense of humor, shared the family flare for sharp dress (he was known for his fashion sense – especially in a profession where others were decidedly not) and the dramatic (his routines with Carol of “The Birds” and “A Horse Named Paul Revere” were legendary), and was not afraid to show physical affection to family and friends.

Jim was an intensely private person who didn’t care what other people thought of him. He disliked small-mindedness and gossip, and said that “small minds talk about people, great minds talk about ideas.” He believed that “it isn’t what people say, it’s what they do” that matters. He could be secretive, but only to spare the feelings of others. On a number of occasions, he quietly lent money to friends in need, without ever seeking a return.

Passionately critical of organized religion on moral grounds, humanism was Jim’s faith, and humanitarianism his practice. He considered himself a Marxist-Socialist, a Blanquist, and a Malthusian; but he was also a traditionalist, an eternal optimist, and a true progressive, a liberal Democrat who never lost faith in democratic institutions and the American people. He was relentlessly involved in Seattle and world communities as a political influencer and an agent of change.

Jim’s erudition, intellectual curiosity, and entrepreneurial spirit were rivaled only by his pride, obstinateness, and suspicion of the expertise of others. His can-do attitude, self-confidence and tenacity knew no bounds. He hated waste, and insisted on doing things himself before hiring a professional. He built a greenhouse with borrowed books and his own two hands because he wanted to see if he could. He mistrusted lawyers, politicians, the military and the clergy, and (perhaps unfortunately) doctors in particular - although he considered going to medical school after retirement.

Jim was hard worker who never complained. He loved children and animals, and Seattle, with all its greenery. He loved the solitude of his Mercedes and his greenhouse (where he would smoke his pipe, pouring over copies of Louis L’Amour, John LeCarre, the classics, Foreign Affairs and Archeology), and decorating the grounds of the house with flowers and labyrinthine watering systems. He loved watching tennis and football, skiing and golfing, sunbathing and snorkling, studying horse racing forms and developing betting “systems”, and entertaining. He was an accomplished chef, and a talented dancer of tango, samba, waltz and swing.

Jim was a self-taught musician who never read music, but played many instruments, primarily guitar. He played flamenco and blues, and memorably “Puff the Magic Dragon” for several generations of wide-eyed young family members.

Jim was selflessly devoted to his family, which he prized above all else. He would, and did, do anything and everything for them. He was a provider, whose frugality and formidable business acumen ensured that they would want for nothing after he was gone. His love for his friends was also unconditional, and his empathy for the marginalized and less fortunate among us was reflected in his years of advocacy and allyship. He was proud of little Jimmy, his namesake, and desired to have him know his grandfather, as he himself never did.

Jim is survived by his immediate family, and by dozens of adoring nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews and their partners.

A celebration of Jim’s life was held on Saturday, August 20, 2022, for family and close friends.

In lieu of sending cards or flowers, please consider making a donation to the Dr. Jimmy Ray Simmons Scholarship for a deserving student at the University of Washington. Give online or make your check payable to the University of Washington Foundation, noting: MAP Scholarship Fund (MAPFND) in memory of Jim Simmons. You can mail your check to the following address: University of Washington Foundation, Box 359505, Seattle, WA 98195.